Quarantine

If you're a fan of verite horror, then 2008 was your year. Quarantine is the third movie since January to feature ostensible first person footage shot by a person experiencing an apocalyptic threat to humanity. While containing effectively visceral moments, Quarantine holds up poorly compared to Cloverfield or Diary of the Dead. At it's best, verite horror can be mercilessly scary by utilizing the hyperrealism of video equipment and long, unedited shots, and by jettisoning the sort of cheap effects, like foreboding music and fast cutting that remind the viewer that they're just watching a movie. At it's worst, verite horror ends up being indistinguishable from a first person survival horror video game, with missions to accomplish and monsters popping up at predictable intervals. Quarantine falls squarely into the latter camp.

The film starts promisingly enough, as a young television reporter (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman (Steven Harris) tag along with a couple of firefighters on an emergency call to a dungeon-like apartment building where an elderly woman has been screaming in her locked apartment. The atmosphere is creepy and realistic, and when the old lady starts biting people, it's genuinely unsettling. But once the military shows up to quarantine the building and the survivors start screaming and running around and getting infected and biting each other, the proceedings dissolve into an increasingly tedious bout of whack-a-zombie as infected people jump out of the dark at the protagonists with numbing frequency. When I needed to go to the bathroom near the end, I half-hoped that one of the characters would reach a save point and I could go grab some Milk Duds.