Quarantine

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🎙️ EPISODE 622: 12.19.22 I'm finishing up a re-read of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan. A prominent invention in this book is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. I often call the forces that dictate the movie choices in this series "The GODS of TRUE RANDOM" and I see many parallels to the concocted religion in that 1959 story. The website that I use is the very definition of indifferent. It simply scans IMDb and shoots back a random film entry. But unlike getting cancer or winning the lottery, I'm still CHOOSING to go through with the actual viewing of these selections. So, as I am taking an extended break from this subset of critiques, I'll also be retiring that phrase. Because no GOD, utterly indifferent or otherwise, would subject a human-being to the 2008 found footage zombie movie, Quarantine.

I had relatively high hopes for this title. I thought, coming on the heels of COVID (ever heard of it?), that there was a strange serendipity in closing things out with a film called Quarantine. This was just my dumb brain wanting things to work out, though. As one would (and should) expect, the series has run the complete gamut from the surprisingly bad to the truly awful, and from to the enlightening and sublime, with most of the options falling squarely in between. And so we close things out (for now) with one of worse movies of the series. And so it goes.

It isn't all horrible. A remake of a much better received Spanish film (Rec), things start off alright. This is a found footage movie in that it uses the device of a two-person documentary news crew doing a ride-along with the Los Angeles Fire Department as the entry into this story about a viral outbreak and the virus is people turn into zombies. It was never gonna be 'good' but the first act is serviceable.

But a little after the halfway point, everything comes off the hinges. I usually don't complain about shakiness if it serves the story/vibe (I even like Cloverfield!). Quarantine's shakiness gave me a virus, though. And not just that, but it's constant barrage of jump scares within the shaky-cam and "too dark to see anything" aesethetic? Who wants this? Who is this for? They should've called this movie Headache because that's what's it gave me. I'm just completely immune to being scared by a movie like this, or even mildly thrilled for that matter. The jump scares are much more funny than they are terrifying. And the writing/acting is as good as you'd expect. Neither are really the point. However, I did like this part when the guy who played Richard Fish on Ally McBeal explained what a veterinarian is...


Need I say more?

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 621 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 623 ⫸

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Quarantine is a 2008 American found footage horror film directed and co-written by John Erick Dowdle, produced by Sergio Aguero, Doug Davison, and Roy Lee, and co-written by Drew Dowdle, being a remake of the Spanish film REC. The film stars Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez, Columbus Short, Greg Germann, Steve Harris, Dania Ramirez, Rade Šerbedžija, and Johnathon Schaech. It follows a reporter and her cameraman assigned to a pair of Los Angeles firemen who follow a distress call to an apartment building where they discover a deadly mutated strain of rabies spreading among the building's occupants. It was released on October 10, 2008.