Pacificapocalypse

We Watch Movies: Quarantine

Ok let’s get this out in the open first: I’m over the docu/horror flick. Enough with the handheld camera work. Yes I get it builds a sense of place and realism, but I’m done. I’m really really done. ( I’m looking at you Cloverfield ).

With that said this movie scared the crap out of us. I mean damn, that was a scary flick. Here we are four years on from Dawn of The Dead (2004) where we got fast zombies and also six years out from 28 Days Later (2002) where we had, not quite zombies, but pretty damn close. And they were fast AND infected AND turned friendly happy guy into flesh ripping Mister Cranky Pants in, what was it? 30 seconds? Damn. Those two twists to the classic zombie paradigm really shifted everything.
They used to be slow, shuffling things who relied upon sheer numbers to eventually whittle down the plucky band of survivors. Now. They’re fast. They can run and climb. Oh hell no.
Since then there’s been little innovation in the cinema zombie, but Quarantine does manage to put a few new spins on the zombie schtick, setting it in a single sealed building was a neat idea for one, making the .gov a partner villain was another. What causes the pleasant residents to turn into mouth foaming killers is actually pretty clever as well as believable, I actually thought that part was one of the more intelligent aspects of the film. I mean, it’s pretty plausible.  Which is freaky.
Ok I *did* get a little tired of Jennifer Carpenter’s giggly cub reporter in the first part of the film, as quickly as I got tired of her, later in the film, screaming and freaking out unintelligibly. ENUNCIATE DAMMIT!. Right, you’re terrified. I get it. Sure I’d probably be babbling and peeing my pants as well, if I were in that situation, but GET A GRIP!.
Some great gotcha terror scare of the leap out and freak out variety, and a bonus sense of the creeping dread as the characters realize, that the .gov has written them off and they are NOT getting out of that building even *if* they survive the nastyness within it.

So yeah, good old fashioned scary film. Pretty smartly written and relatively believable.

Oh! And yet another movie with the greatest actor who’s face you’ve never seen, if only for the last few minutes.