Quarantine (2008)

Zombie Horror

Director John Erick Dowdle

R4 DVD

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Reviewer: Bob Estreich

A TV reporter (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman are assigned to film a Los Angeles Fire Dept unit on the night shift. The unit is called out to an old apartment block, but when they arrive they find the police are already there, summoned to investigate screams from one of the apartments. An elderly lady appears to be hyperactive, ill and confused, but she suddenly turns vicious and kills a fireman by biting his throat out. Things go from bad to worse as more people appear to become infected by some strange disease that makes them aggressively homicidal.

The survivors find they have been locked in the building. The power is cut, phones don’t work, even the TV is out. The reporter and the cameraman keep filming, but outside there appears to be chaos with helicopters and police guarding against anyone leaving, sirens signaling the arrival of more authorities, and a sniper team who will now shoot anyone who tries to leave. The victims of the disease increase as they are attacked by the infected, and killing them is the only way to ensure any sort of safety for the survivors.

A tenant who is a veterinarian says the disease looks like rabies, but with an incredibly fast incubation time measured in minutes rather than days. A team from the Centre for Disease Control, the U.S. authority on infectious disease outbreaks, enters the building and says they have traced the disease to this building from an infected dog which got out. One of the CDC team is killed when a victim unexpectedly awakes. Others are bitten or killed by the zombie-like victims who are now infesting the building.

There is still one possible way of escape. The janitor tells them there is a shaft in the basement which connects to the sewerage tunnels, but he is killed before he can show them where. The three remaining survivors must find the tunnel then find their way out. The reporter still has the TV camera tapes to prove to the world the callous treatment of the quarantined victims.

Unfortunately at this point what until now has been a fine piece of suspense and horror degenerates into continual screaming and an increasingly vague and silly plot involving a monster in the basement. No amount of good acting can save the film from here. Despite the best efforts of Jay Hernandez, Johnathan Schaech and Greg Germann the film is rather let down by a poor, protracted plot at the end. One thing I must note , however – Jennifer Carpenter screams well. In the earlier parts of the story she is the calm, confident self-assured TV reporter, but by the end of the film she has broken down so completely that I wanted to shoot her myself to stop her attracting unwanted attention from the zombies. That’s how much the tension had built up. The buildup was also helped by the handheld camera work. It starts out steady and professional, but degenerates to quick shaky shots as the survivors flee from room to room.

The film is a remake of an earlier Spanish story called Rec. By all accounts the Spanish original was a far superior film, but even this one is gripping apart from the ending. In spite of this, it’s still worth seeing because it is, up to a point, a good horror film.

This review will appear in Volume 2 No.3 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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