Quarantine..NOT a zombie movie!

Okay here's how I'm gonna start this one off. I'm a classic kind of horror guy. I enjoy zombie movies, and I do not enjoy these new variations on viruses. I'm talking about 28 days later, resident evil, kind of stuff. So, when i picked up Quarantine and checked out the description I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that it was again, a virus, and not a zombie movie. But, I decided to give it a shot.

The movie starts out incredibly boring. It's shot from the point of view of a camera man and anchorwoman making a documentary about firemen. It is akin to Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead. This is the first 20 minutes of the movie. It is incredibly boring and I was almost tempted to fast forward through it. If I wanted to see something about firemen I would have rented Rescue Me. The action kicks in when the firemen are called to a building, with the cameraman and anchorwoman right with them.

Basically, the movie centers around a group of tenants, 2 cops, 2 firefighters, the cameraman, and the anchorwoman trapped inside a building which has been, you guessed it, quarantined due to a virus breakout in the building. This virus looks a lot like rabies, not trying to give it away...but the symptoms include foaming at the mouth, red eyes, and a nasty appetite for biting other people. Plus, the dogs in the building are acting rabid, so conclusions can easily be drawn without the veterinarian character letting all of us know that it is in fact human rabies.

The movie has its share of suspense and gore. The creepiest parts come when a little girl gets infected and goes running around in the dark, attacking people. The sheer thought of being trapped in a building with rabid people, who are disappointingly not zombies although some sustain wounds that would definitely kill them before becoming "rabid", is enough to get some scares out of you. Also, the creep level rises a significant amount when the government thinks its a good idea to shut down electricity to the building. Not to mention the fact that they are sniping residents who are not yet infected, but attempting to climb out of the window. In essence you have to assume about 3/4 of the way into the movie that no one is getting out alive.

The ending of the move is a bit disappointing due to the fact that it is extremely predictable. If you have seen the movie you will understand where I am coming from. The movie overall lacks surprise in the plot. If for example one of the members had survived due to some form of a mutated gene which saves them from the virus, I would have enjoyed it a bit more. But, not this time. The writers decided to kill everyone off, how original.

Overall I'm going to give this movie a C-. The whole 20 minute fireman documentary was totally unnecessary and could have been done in 5 minutes. If you want to skip over parts of a movie, it is poorly made. True it is scary, but the plot is totally predictable, and the fact that the way the people become infected is truly a scatterbrained idea. Zombies would have made much more sense. I mean, does the rabies virus make you invincible to harm. An old woman gets shot 5 times and still seems to be able to attack uninfected people. Is a rabid dog invincible? I think not. If you shoot a rabid dog, or it sustains life threatening injuries, it dies. It does not revive and continue attacking. So, making the "infected" non-undead, this movie just does not make sense to me.

I think I love zombie movies too much.