Solve this problem: horse racing is to sports as Quarantine is to ________.
My feeling is, if horse racing is considered a sport and shown on ESPN, then Quarantine is a zombie movie. Ultimately, it's not, it's another "angry virus" movie. In fact, the pitch for this movie was clearly "Cloverfield meets 28 Days Later," only said in Spanish since Quarantine is a remake of Spanish horror film [Rec], and was greenlit while the original was still in production.
The story is about a local journalist (Jennifer Carpenter) who trails along with a firefighting crew to a building that gets, you guessed it, quarantined. Inside, the police and firemen try to calm the pesky infection that's turning the building's tenants into Crazies. The film makes an effort to make it all feel and look real, and the cast is pretty solid. In fact, if the film were to be rated on performance alone, Jonathan Schaech's mustache would warrant the full five stars.
The problem is, Quarantine never strays far from the two influences involved in its pitch, with only a few surprises to offer in a film that you've (mostly) seen before. The shaky camera work, nausea-inducing in Cloverfield, is even more so here, since almost no scene has a stable shot, with subjects constantly going in and out of focus. The camera is so unstable, in fact, that if they actually tried to cut together the news story that sets up the plot, it would be one of the wildest looking local news stories you've ever seen.
So outside of a few moments of ingenuity, the cameraman getting a pretty bad ass moment for one, Quarantine offers nothing new. What are the scariest and worst things about Quarantine? Answer after the photo (Beware, this is not spoiler free).
To get the full effect of this photo, move your head up and down and side to side.
The scariest thing is that once they realize the infection is rabies (conveniently one of the tenants is a veterinarian), it's revealed that there is no cure for rabies and the only way to really test for it is to take a brain sample. Really? That seems like medieval medicine! The worst thing is that Quarantine burns its big moments (and their ending, ultimately) in their trailers, poster, and internet ads. And since you've seen it already, the film ends on a down note. It succeeds on being an effective sum of its influenced parts, but fails to bring anything you haven't seen already.
