What do we want out of horror movies? I don't know, but I want something a little more than this.
The set-up for this film is pretty cool. A news crew traveling with a fire engine squad arrives at a building to investigate the piercing scream of an elderly woman. And then the woman appears to have some kind of sickness - she attacks a firefighter while foaming at the mouth.
The nice twist is that everybody in the film is quarantined - sealed in the building. We spend the middle third of the movie getting to know all the neighbors. One of them is a vet, who explains that the symptoms look suspiciously like rabies.
But the last third of the film is hampered seriously by just how abjectly stupid everybody acts. Even after we learn that some kind of virus has led to an infection that leads to maniacal aggression by those affected, the medical crews are remarkably casual when dealing with the infected. And even after this point of the film, when a little girl starts foaming at the mouth, a policeman unbelievably tries to comfort her and tell her she'll be all right - in spite of having seen four or five similarly infected people launch attacks.
At this point, the viewer just stops caring. The shaky cam, first-person approach doesn't help any.
Horror directors should learn that what makes a film scary is not the number of characters killed off, but how they are done in. Quarantine does so in a shaky-cam, absurd manner that leaves the viewer more dizzy than scared.
And the very worst thing about the film is that its final scene was revealed in the trailer.
It didn't have to be done this way. It could have been a lot better.
The set-up for this film is pretty cool. A news crew traveling with a fire engine squad arrives at a building to investigate the piercing scream of an elderly woman. And then the woman appears to have some kind of sickness - she attacks a firefighter while foaming at the mouth.
The nice twist is that everybody in the film is quarantined - sealed in the building. We spend the middle third of the movie getting to know all the neighbors. One of them is a vet, who explains that the symptoms look suspiciously like rabies.
But the last third of the film is hampered seriously by just how abjectly stupid everybody acts. Even after we learn that some kind of virus has led to an infection that leads to maniacal aggression by those affected, the medical crews are remarkably casual when dealing with the infected. And even after this point of the film, when a little girl starts foaming at the mouth, a policeman unbelievably tries to comfort her and tell her she'll be all right - in spite of having seen four or five similarly infected people launch attacks.
At this point, the viewer just stops caring. The shaky cam, first-person approach doesn't help any.
Horror directors should learn that what makes a film scary is not the number of characters killed off, but how they are done in. Quarantine does so in a shaky-cam, absurd manner that leaves the viewer more dizzy than scared.
And the very worst thing about the film is that its final scene was revealed in the trailer.
It didn't have to be done this way. It could have been a lot better.