Quarantine

A remake of a Spanish film of 2007 called REC that got very good reviews at Rotten Tomatoes … and one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. For that reason I’d like to see REC (not yet available on DVD) to see what could be made of the promising premise that this movie totally wrecked. The idea: A super-rabies virus is loose in an apartment building—illuminated entirely by 5-watt light bulbs, it seems, most of which are burned out—and makes anyone exposed to it a rapid, frothing maniac within one hour. These maniacs like nothing more than to crouch in the dark and then attack anything that moves with superhuman strength. The building has been sealed off and the people inside are apparently expendable. They try to escape.
Okay, I’d watch that movie. But not this one.
Because we saw it at the drive-in I was at first inclined to cut it some slack. See, this is a very dark movie, like Cloverfield, and like that one it is shot entirely with hand-held cameras. Dark movies are a problem at the drive-in, because there is too much ambient light. However, also like Cloverfield, this is a whiplash movie, meaning that if you saw it on the huge screen in a theater, you’d get a headache and eyestrain, because the camera moves in a willfully, and distractingly, jerky manner. In Cloverfield, which was supposedly shot by amateurs on a cell phone, this makes sense, but this one is supposed to be by a TV newsman. Couldn’t he steady it every once in a while? This means that the ideal way to see it would be on a widescreen HDTV (which we have now!), so at least some of the details could be seen, without needing a neck brace afterward.
There’s so much more I could say, but this movie is so awful I don’t even want to waste any more time over it.
… oh, yes I will, to mention that the last half hour was among the most awful experiences I’ve ever had at the movies. The female main character is shrieking almost nonstop, and when she’s not doing that she’s hyperventilating, noisily. And talk about dull! Every door they open, ever corner they turn, they run into a rabid person who jumps out like a jack-in-the-apartment-building. I’m not exaggerating here. Every door, every corner, up in the frickin’ attic where nobody has been in years! They apparently crawled up there just to scare the girl. Result: after about the fifth BOOO!!!! you yawn, and by the 20th you want to find the director and writer and beat the crap out of them. And that girl, too. Anything to shut her up.