Possessing a plot that has more holes than Swiss cheese, to use a (fittingly) common cliché, it is difficult to truly pinpoint what is going on throughout Quarantine, a new horror movie directed by John Erick Dowdle.
The Storyline
The premise itself is a little shaky: TV reporter Angela Vidal (played by Jennifer Carpenter) and her loyal cameraman, Scott Percival (Steve Harris), are on location at a fire station in Los Angeles when they get called to an apartment complex. The LAPD, who are present, but for some reason have yet to investigate, explain that the landlord heard screaming from a suite belonging to an old woman living alone.
From here, we slowly discover that most of the residents have been - or are about to be - infected with an advanced strain of rabies, which leaves them foaming at the mouth and furiously hungry for human flesh. The disease itself is rather unoriginal; the victims of infection are, when it all boils down, just zombies. Oh, and they have also been quarantined within the complex - any move towards a door or window and the residents are confronted by men in army fatigues with very large guns. Isolation + Zombies = Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, etc.
The Filming Style
The entire film is shot with a single, hand-held camera. Essentially, we get the story as seen through Scott's eyes. This creates, however, a number of problems for the audience (and therefore for the filmmakers). Firstly, the intensity of the circumstances leads to extremely shaky filming - think Blair Witch Project, tenfold. Initially, the style of filming allows the audience to feel the desperation of the quarantined strangers. No one knows exactly what is happening, but the danger is ominous, and nerves are on the rise.
After the first twenty minutes, though, it becomes annoyingly clear that the hand-held camera is a gimmick being used to create fear in the audience. It fails when (A) we are unable to focus on any single aspect of anything for periods of over 10 minutes at a time, (B) we begin to wonder why a professionally trained cameraman would not zoom out from his subjects in order to clarify the situation, and (C) we realize that nothing of importance is actually happening, but rather the shaking camera itself is supposed to be scaring us.
The Verdict
In the end, too many questions arise for Quarantine to feel satisfying in any way. How and why has this strain of rabies been created? Will quarantining the residents of this apartment actually solve the problem? Why doesn't Angela stop reporting to help the numerous people bleeding to death in the corner? Who, exactly, is the mysterious man in the attic who is the mastermind of this whole situation, and why do we only meet him for 10, unexplained minutes?
Quarantine seems more like a collage of horror movie elements that have already been done rather than it does a new endeavour into the genre. Unfortunately, what it does borrow from films long past, it does not utilize well enough to act as an homage. Stick with the originals instead.
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