Going all sick house...

So the Saturday I watched this I was really sick and I mean really sick. So it was kind of fitting. After enjoying a late dinner of chicken and rice, my favorite kind of soup, although chicken and stars is pretty damn good to, I settled in to watch something.

So I popped in Quarantine (2008) a remake of [Rec] (2007) a Spanish horror film. The film follows a television reporter, Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) as they tag along with the night shift of a Los Angeles fire house. While at there they meet firefighters Fletcher (Johnathon Schaech) and Jake (Jay Hernandez), who they'll be tagging along with that night. They respond to a medical emergency at an apartment house. There they find an old woman in her apartment foaming at the mouth. She attacks them and all hell breaks loose. Well hell in small increments. And that's one of the problems I have with this film. There's not enough horror in this horror movie. Not too much happens until the last half of the movie and then it's nothing that hasn't been seen in other better films.



Want to see someone jump out of the dark at the camera? Done. Want to see a lot of shakey cam and running around with people screaming their head off? Again done. That brings me to another problem. The acting. There's some good actors in this film and they get wasted. In more ways then one. Now I've got a confession to make. Two actually. One I'm a big fan of The Blair Witch shakey cam, found footage horror movie since first seeing The Blair Witch. When done well it can be creepy and affecting. When done poorly it can be boring, hard to follow and the actors come off as hysterical loons. Which leads me back to the acting in this film and my second confession. I've got a thing for Jennifer Carpenter. Since seeing her on Dexter and in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. But here she gets nothing to do but scream, frail her arms about, look sadly at the camera and hyperventilate. Some of the lines of the actors had to say were just plain laughable like when Jennifer Carpenter's reporter character looks at the camera after one of the first attacks, her face blank with shock she says "Did you get that?" I guess we're supposed to be shocked but it comes off as cheesy. Maybe The actors realized that the script was not good and decided to just play it like a sci-fi channel movie.



This could have been fun or creepy or both. It's a cool idea poorly handled. I haven't seen the original so I have no idea how this one plays when compared to it. The worst sin this film makes is not to be thrilling in any way.