Quarantine

This was a terrible, terrible movie. It’s probably not the worse I’ve ever seen (by far), but it reminded me of one of those cheaply made B-grade horror movies you used to see at the drive-in. Jennifer Carpenter was great in it, but overall it seemed like a ridiculous plot was made worse by the fact that every technique used to make the movie seem scary has already been seen a gazillion times. *yawn*
I’m sorry, but the jerky camera technique lost its effectiveness not long after The Blair Witch Project. Mostly when I’m looking at grainy images at odd angles in movies now, it’s more distracting than anything. Maybe I would have bought into it more readily if the premise of this movie wasn’t so insulting. I mean… come on. A news reporter doing a story on a fire department winds up getting quarantined in a building by the Federal government because some guy up in the attic was concocting some kind of anarchist plot with some bio-weaponry virus he ordered from a Sears catalog or something? Then there’s the idea that outside the building there’s a camera crew that’s reporting on the fact that this building has been quarentined, but apparently never catches the armed personnel that keep shooting the inhabitants as they try to escape?
I liked Jennifer Carpenter in this movie. She was the only actor who seemed the least bit convincing in her role. Everyone else seemed to intuitively know how bad this movie was going to be, and put in only the minimal amount of effort. If not for the multi-million dollar ad campaign that featured Jennifer Carpenter being dragged away from the camera, this movie would have gone straight to DVD. Perhaps it should have. There’s nothing new here.
1 out of 5 stars