Directed by: John Erick Dowdle
Starring: Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris
Other Actors of Note: Jay Hernandez, Jermaine Jackson, Doug Jones
Plot: Television reporter Angela Vidal (Carpenter) and her cameraman (Harris) are assigned to spend the night shift with a Los Angeles Fire Station. After a routine 911 call takes them to a small apartment building, they find police officers already on the scene in response to blood curdling screams coming from one of the apartment units. They soon learn that a woman living in the building has been infected by something unknown. After a few of the residents are viciously attacked, they try to escape with the news crew in tow, only to find that the CDC has quarantined the building. Phones, internet, televisions and cell phone access have been cut-off, and officials are not relaying information to those locked inside. When the quarantine is finally lifted, the only evidence of what took place is the news crew’s videotape. Taken from www.imdb.com.
My generation can fuck right the hell off.
I went into this movie and found that the audience was all 20-somethings around my age and gave out an annoyed sigh. You might wonder why I would be so dissappointed to find that I was surrounded by people roughly my own age. It's mainly because I've found that they are (at least the ones I encounter most of the time) ignorant, annoying, and functionally retarded. (For reference I am working on getting a lawn so that I may tell children to get off of it.)
The reason I mention this is because "Quarantine" is one of the most unnecessary remakes I think has ever been made, seeing as the movie it was based on, "[REC]", came out in November of 2007. So why are we being treated to this remake of a movie that's not even a year old? Because of the aforementioned tweeny fucktards who are about as deep as a drop of piss on a toilet seat and would refuse to watch anything that isn't in English. And they won't read subtitles, because that would totally interrupt their texting.
Fortunately we have the lesser-quality dumbed-down remake that spells everything out and won't interrupt their texting. Though to be honest "Quarantine" is still too good and too smart for them as evidenced by the fact that A) I liked it and B) None of the pink popped collar assholes that felt that the rest of the theater wanted to hear their review of "well that was retarded" did.
Once again we meet Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter), a reporter on a late-night tv show this time set in LA instead of Not-Madrid Spain (I suck at geography, fuck you) where once again her and her cameraman, named Scott (Steve Harris) this time instead of Pablo, are shadowing some firefighters. They get a medical call and then head to an apartment to find a crazy old woman who takes a bite out of a policeman's neck and then they come back downstairs to find that they've been quarantined in the apartment building.
Jennifer Carpenter is a perfect choice to portray Angela Vidal. She is equally as if not cuter and more charming than Manuela Velasco (the actress who played Angela in the orignal film.) One of the finer points is that that Carpenter's Angela doesn't feel the need to talk as fucking much as Velasco's did. Carpenter communicates the same emotions through actions whereas Velasco wouldn't shut her goddamn mouth for five fucking seconds. If anything Angela is an improvement in this case.
Another character that has improved in the remake is Jake (named Manu in the original film), one of the firefighters who Angela and Scott are shadowing. Manu was fifteen shades of twenty, but Jake is easily twenty-five shades. Jay Hernandez showed definite potential in 2005's "Hostel" and here it seems he's come close to realizing it. Much like Carptenter, Hernandez conveys his thoughts and emotions very well through actions and facial expressions. This is also helped by the fact that Jake is just all kinds of awesome. He kills 3 zombies with a sledgehammer (one of them being a fucking German Shepard!) and then gives another one the Steven Seagal neck-break.
Now of the 3 main characters, Scott is the dissappointment. This is not to say that Stever Harris does a bad job, in fact he's just as likeable and realistic as Pablo Rosso in the original. Much like Pablo, Scott is the real main character of this film, we see everything through his eyes but this movie tries too much to make Scott seem like less of a passive observor by bringing him into the action more. This involves him commonly dropping or setting the camera aside (which gets more than a little annoying), there's also a scene of him killing a rat, and then one of him beating a zombie to death with the camera. I'm sure the latter is supposed to be traumatic or scary but it ends up being more funny than anything.
The rest of the characters are annoying and unimportant. That's one of the bigger dissappointments of the film as while the tenants weren't a big part of the original film they felt less like extras than they do here.
The effects in this movie are fair. Aside from Scott stomping on a rat the effects all look rather real but the problem is that Scott seems to shy away from every damn scene of violence and special effect in the whole movie.
This is the big problem, the camera seems to not want to focus in on anythign that makes the movie scary. Apparently the director decided he wanted to try and be fucking hitchcock and not give us a good look at ANYTHING. Even the newspaper clippings at the end that explain whats going on aren't seeable because for the brief moment Scott actually lingers on them the fucking lense is out of focus. The camera is always going in and out of focus and the light on top is flashing on and off like a fucking strobe and its terribly annoying.
Which brings me to the next problem. Everything is too fucking dark! "[REC]" to its credit was very brightly lit and everything was very easy to see until the power went out toward the end at which point it was supposed to shock and scare you and make things hard to see. However the shock is gone this time and honestly I didn't even notice that the power had gone out until Jay Hernandez said it had (but yet they still manage to use the electric elevator...?)
And finally, I know George A. Romero put a couple cracks in the 4th wall with "Diary of the Dead" but to his credit you could tell what was going on, and to be honest "[REC]" did a pretty fair job too. But just like "Cloverfield", "Quarantine" seems to have been filmed by a cerebral palsy sufferer sitting atop a paint can shaker.
Let it be said that "Quarantine" is by no means a waste of film. Unnecessary though it may be, for the most part it seems to meet or in some cases even surpass its predeccessor in quality. yes okay the darkness thing is annoying and the tenants are all vague stereotypes but the lead characters are wonderfully done and the authenticity of the film's opening is outdone in the American version. All parts are played perfectly and you really feel like you are watching real footage shot by people as opposed to characters in a movie.
The movie holds its own despite all the stupid flaws and comes out close to as good as the original....
That is... until we come to the end.
The following should only be read if you've seen "[REC]" or don't care if the ending is spoiler for you, otherwise skip past the next picture. But honestly if you can't figure out or at very least venture an educated guess as to what happens to the main character after watching any number of the other "first-person camera" movies then you truly are an ignorant dipshit.
The ending of "[REC]" was the big cherry on top of the sundae. The movie had been nothing but good all the way through. But the last 15 minutes were where we were taken out of a nightmare and plunged straight into hell.
Things happen roughly like they did in the original, Angela and Scott are the only ones left and they enter the penthouse apartment (called "the attic" in this movie because apparently Americans don't know what penthouses are, that's news to me.)
So anyway in the original we were treated to newspaper clippings and explanation that the zombie virus originated from a girl named Niña Medeiros who was supposedly possessed by a demon. It is revealed that the owner of the loft was a priest who was trying to cure Niña and had apparently been giving the virus to small children for trial runs.
Then the attic door swings open and Pablo puts the camera into the attack to look around, whereupon an infected child makes us all shit ourselves and breaks the light on the camera, thus forcing Pablo to turn on the night vision.
It is at this point that we see the silhouette of Niña coming down the hall on wobbily legs looking like some sort of otherworldly creature coming down the hallway nothing but skin and bones clad only in a pair of soiled panties and clutching a claw hammer. The shots of Niña looking around the apartment still to this day haunt me in my nightmares, that is probably the creepiest shit I have ever seen and when she finally turns on the cameraman you will most likely have a mild heart attack.
The director apparnetly looked at this masterpiece of a scene and went "nah, fuck that." The possession has been replaced with a strain of super rabies released by a doomsday cult. Apparently once again the producers were concerned about religious overtones in much the same way they were with "Doom" and decided to opt for biological instead.
I swear if they remade "The Exorcist" today Regan would've been bitten by some sort of radioactive woodchuck and Father Merrin would exorcise the mutation from her by beating her into submission with is gargantuan pectoral muscles.
Basically, this time around the owner of the loft is a member of the doomsday cult and he's injected rats as well as several small children with the virus. It tries to play coy and pretend to be mysterious by not spelling that out for you in this scene but with the rat trying to attack Scott earlier and the shot of a child running through a vent in one scene you will be able to easily figure this out if you're not busy texting at the time. (So it was pretty much just me.)
Then the same thing happens with the attic door but we get too good of a look at the child and it kind of takes away from the fright factor. The camera lingers for too long. But now is the moment of truth, Niña is coming, right?
Wrong. Replacing Javier Botet as the tall annorexic scary as shit zombie Niña Medeiros is Doug Jones as "Thin Infected Man" basically a thin guy in a diaper with a hammer. Now the dissappointment of this is no fault of Jones' he does a brilliant job.
The problem is that we don't get to fucking see him. Rather than watching the awkward and very disturbing movements of "Thin Infected Man" the camera focuses on Jennifer Carpenter looking scared and obscuring our view. There was a point where I just wanted to scream "GET OUT OF THE WAY BITCH I WANT TO SEE THE MONSTER!"
Unfortunately we never get a good look at "Thin Infected Man" and any sort of creepiness or inhuman movement done by the brilliant Doug Jones is all for naught as we only see bits and pieces of him before he beats the shit out of the camera. Even the scene of him eating on Scott's corpse lasts only a split second and then the movie ends.
Now the director was quoted suggesting that the movie ended a different way than the original which made it okay that they spoiled the ending in the trailer, so that makes it all right, right? Wrong. The director, it turns out, is a fucking liar. So not only is the ending shown in the trailer, it's shown ON THE FUCKING POSTER!
As much as the glaring fuck-up that was the ending pissed me off, it still wasn't as infuriating as the first "That was retarded" coming from the big sunglasses wearing Paris Hilton wannabe cunt in the top row. The term "pearls before swine" came to mind and the sad thing is it wasn't even a particularly good pearl, it was a decent looking but still lackluster pearl but it was still too good for these stupid bastards who undoubtedly list the "American Pie" movies as "THE BEST MOVIES EVAR OMGZ!!!" on their facebook account right under the picture of Soulja Boy.
But hey, for an unneccesarry remake "Quarantine" was a very good movie, now look for the remake of 2011's "Spider-Man 4 coming out sometime in 2009.
I give "Quarantine" a 4 out of 5. It's not as good as "[REC]" but still worth checking out.
Now get off my lawn before I turn on the sprinklers you damn little hoodlums!
1 comment:
tee hee...Soulja Boy.
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