With Halloween just around the corner, and teenagers looking to get scared, it’s easy to believe that Quarantine is going to be a money-making machine. It will sail to the top of the box office opening weekend, but will die out when the next Saw thing comes out in a couple of weeks. It will make you squirm in your seat, but overall, Quarantine is run-of-the-mill.

Before I review Quarantine, I want to take you back to the 90s, when an unknown, small, insignificant movie slipped into theaters. From there, it spawned a whole series of indie horror films, the start of a new genre consisting of footage that was “found” at the incident. I’m talking about The Last Broadcast.

What, did you think I meant The Blair Witch Project? Well, strangely enough, Broadcast was the inspiration for Witch, and from there, we got Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and now, Quarantine. Broadcast was literally broadcast to theaters, so its understandable that pretty much nobody saw this since barely any theaters carried it. It told the story of a corny television talk show called Fact or Fiction, in which the two hosts, Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler, take calls requesting them to debunk urban myths. In this case, they were asked about The Jersey Devil. In an effort to resolve the matter, the team decides to venture into the Pine Barrens to search, while broadcasting the whole thing live. So Avkast and Wheeler hire a “telepathic” assistant named Jim Suerd to help them navigate, and throughout the trip, eyebrows raise at his erratic behavior. Soon enough, the two hosts get slaughtered by a mystery figure, leaving Suerd to return alone and become the #1 suspect for the murders.

All signs point to Suerd here, there’s blood on his cloths belonging to Wheeler and Avkast, but the real indicator is a point in the footage where Suerd overreacts and shoves the cameraman, who had previously made an offensive comment denying his abilities. But a film maker named David Leigh doesn’t buy all of the evidence, and his research reveals that Suerd may not be the real perpetrator. The whole movie is narrated by a monotonous voice that is both creepy and mysterious, and putting that over photographs of the Pine Barrens makes the whole movie chilling, even if it is flawed. Even though it was Cannibal Holocaust that came up with the idea, you can still say that Broadcast was the inspiration for Cloverfield and other hand-held camera films.

Now, let’s move on to Quarantine.

With such a thin storyline and lack of atmosphere, Quarantine is a complete bore. I know it’s just footage that was supposedly found at the scene of the incident, but the film makers behind Quarantine could at least take the footage to the editing room and crop out one of the hundred “zombie fistfights” and put in some dialogue speculating on what the problem is, or some reveal of a new symptom. In fact, Quarantine has such a horrible story that it even has legitimate plot holes. Yeah, somehow I found a plot hole in a script that already doesn’t explain a damn thing. I won’t bother telling you what it is, since I would need to describe half of a movie that I already don’t give a stomped on rat’s ass about in the first place.

Another problem – the zombies. They aren’t scary in the slightest. Let me ask you a question: would The Blair Witch Project be scary if you got a nice, long, well lit look at the people who were lurking in the dark? Would that last heart-stopping scene be scary if the “Blair Witch” had been glimpsed by the camera? No.  That being said, Quarantine not only shows us its zombies, it pushes them up onto the stage like an 8 year old in an elementary school play.

So we’re not scared, thrilled, or satisfied. That already sounds like an atomic bomb of a movie. However, I must compliment the acting from Jennifer Carpenter. A lot of people bash the acting because it’s “overdone”, but how would you feel if you’ve seen at least six people die from being bitten by infected beings that are much faster and stronger than you in a cramped, dark building that you can’t escape without fear of being shot? That’s what I thought, and that’s why her performance is so good. It’s tiring to act panicked and hysterical, but she does it.

But how, in a situation so bad-looking, does this film lack thrills? I can tell that forms of intelligence made this film, and it shows. It’s like an essay you write for school that you take pride in, and after you hand it in wait a week until you get a grade and a “see me after class” from your professor. Then you take time to reread it and realize how truly awful it was (see: my 1st and 2nd reviews).

Do you want to know Quarantine’s real crippling flaw is? The “put down the camera” flaw. In Blair Witch and Broadcast, there was at least a real reason to keep the camera. As for everything else, I would’ve lost it ages ago. You may argue that the characters need the built-in flashlight that the camera has, but that’s a very thin interpretation, considering that they could just find a flashlight and ditch the camera. (And for a cameraman, he cannot hold a camera to save his life.) Also, there was a point where I almost wanted to strangle one of the characters. Towards the beginning of the film, when everyone was first sealed into the building, the landlord suggests going out a window as an exit. Towards the end of the movie, he finally mentions a door from the basement leading outside to a back alley of some sort. Now, why would he neglect to mention the secret exit before the window out in the open? Is he suicidal?

Bottom line, don’t go. Don’t waste your brain, time, money, or life. If you want zombies and shaking cameras, rent Diary of the Dead. Otherwise, go for one of the oldie horror films to celebrate Halloween, maybe Re-Animator or Night of the Living Dead. Or maybe egg any theater showing this movie.