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Quarantine


I had cleverly avoided all the advance advertising eccept for the bare bones that it was an outbreak movie. This was to my advantage as the movie was mostly spoiled for Squirrel by it's own trailers, which I had gone to lengths not to see/pay attention to.

This is a b*****d child of Romero and The Blair Witch project. It's fairly honest about this, being full of homage shots stolen from both. That said, it really wasn't bad as a Grindhouse film. It was exploitive, violent, a bit predictable. I could tell from the set up/fore showing at various points how they would likely play out. There was legitimate suspense for me, not having seen the spoiler trailers, but it was only on a few points. it still managed to be creepy and the disease model, though dicey, was acceptable. I was willing to give them the amount of wiggle room they took, as they seemed to play fair unlike 28 Days Later where the disease model was so preposterous I had trouble suspending disbelief.

There were pacing issues. The foreplay went on a bit too long. I would rather have had more time in the things going to hell stage instead of of long boring passages early on that could have been cut down.

The characters frequently did dumb things early on, but mostly realistically so. If you don't know what you are dealing with, you play be the book if you are a first responder. My problems were mostly with the decision process after the quarantine. At that point I have some serious problems with some of the things that happened, because I contend that first responders would be a little better with crisis than that. I think that in a world with movies and video games, at least one person in that situation would be able to think of basic elementary precautions that any eight year old could come up with. Yes, initial shock would be in play at first, but I think it's reasonable that people could start thinking intelligently after an hour or two. just saying.

I still enjoyed it despite the self consciousness and the occasional dumb. I liked a couple characters, I very much liked the disease model, and some of the images were clever. It was better than several horror movies I've seen recently, including the annoying Diary of the Dead by the great Romero himself, but it is forgettable shock for the most part. That's okay, but don't expect greatness.


If you plan on seeing this, avoid all advertising for this, especially the trailers. Leave the room so you can't see the images; sing lalala over the announcer. Seriously. I had a much better time than Squirrel because I knew nothing.