31 Days of Halloween: Quarantine

2008,  John Erick Dowdle (Devil) -- Netflix

This movie is a remake of the 2007 Spanish movie Rec by Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza, who also directed the sequel [Rec]². This movie is of the tradition of faithfully remaking a movie exactly as the first, but for American audiences, and set in the US.

I rewatched this as a filler for this year's "31 Days of Halloween" as there are always a few days we miss due to ... life. I am also tempted to rewatch the original, just because.

Found Footage movies usually have the conceit that we know everyone is dead. The footage is supposed to be recovered after they all die, or disappear. In this case, the "everyone is dead" comes preposed because the trailers had the final scene of the movie -- main character Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter, Dexter) being dragged off into the darkness by an unknown assailant. 

The movie begins with her footage of the San Francisco firehall. She is one of those fluff reporters building a repertoire of feel-good stories, and this one is a ride-along with a local fire station. There is some lively banter, some flirting between her and a couple of handsome firefighters Fletcher (Jonathan Schaech, Takers) and Jake (Jay Hernandez, Magnum PI), and then the call comes. They tell her that most of their calls are paramedic in nature, and most of the firefighters are trained in medical first response. An elderly lady in an old apartment building has been making a godawful din and they have called police & paramedics. A bunch of tenants have been wakened, including the super. When the cops investigate, the aggressive old lady pounces on one of the cops and tears out his throat. Everyone panics, carrying the bleeding cop to the lobby floor. Not long after, Fletcher the firefighter comes plummeting from above, crashing into the lobby floor in a bloody, broken mess. When they try to exit the building to the waiting ambulance, they are halted by men with guns and the doors are locked. 

Remember, the entire introduction is via the camera man's viewpoint, and Angela's constant coaxing to get it all on camera. At this point, she isn't panicking, but everyone around her is. Full on chaotic panic from first responders & residents with only Jake doing his best to keep a level head. The super points out that there is an overhang with window access from his office, and maybe someone could escape from there, but before they can, spotlights and armed forces and a big plastic tarp is dropped. The are being sealed in, entirely. Soon power and phone are cut. They are trapped inside with whatever is going on. The old lady has been shot, as she has killed her housekeeper. The panic ramps up.

Some details are eked out as the movie progresses. One of the residents had a sick dog, and her husband brought it to the vet. Their daughter has a fever. Another resident shows signs of illness, frothing at the mouth. The injured cop and firefighter and both salivating really bad. A vet who lives in the building comments on that being signs of rabies, but rabies takes month to progress to that state, and by that time it is fatal. The CDC sends in bunny suited specialists to test Fletcher and the cop, but that doesn't end well. Yep, zombies or Infected, but aggressive and killers.

The movie is very very effective in keeping the tension high, like on the edge of a knife high. There are lots of people screaming at each other, emotions are ratcheted up to 11 and normally this just bugs me, but here it feels appropriate. Soon, the movie escalates from a group of people trying to figure out how to escape the building, to just fleeing and hiding, until its only Jake and Angela and Scott, the camera man. They flee to the penthouse apartment, rented by a man not seen in months. His is not an apartment, more a chaotic mess of a lab, an Angela cannot help herself but rifle through the notes, giving us hints of this man investigating some sort of ancient tribal virus, something horrific and violent. The movie ends with the camera light breaking, Scott is down, the nightvision filter is on and Angela is doing her best to hide from a gaunt creature that must be the tenant. And then, like he poster, she is dragged screaming off into the dark.

Being a faithful remake of the original, I do like this movie, but again recall liking the original better, but likely only due to it being my first exposure to the story, and my enjoyment of another country's vision of an infected zombie apocalypse emerging. The found footage nature is mostly effective, if not entirely realistic. At some point, someone would have just said "fuck this" and tosses the bulky camera, screwing the record of events.

Rewatch: 28 Days Later & 28 Weeks Later

2002, Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave) -- download
2007, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Damsel) -- download

Its been more than a decade since I last rewatched either of these movies. But the new one is coming out, and I wanted to remind myself. And also see how I felt about the groundbreaking first one. 

28 Days Later opens with a naked Jim (Cillian Murphy, Peaky Blinders) on the operating table in a hospital. Given he is not aware of any virus, I would imagine he's been hooked up to enough fluids to ride out the entire 28 days? Speculative Fiction always requires a certain amount of forgiveness as to how he would still be alive. But this opening, cribbed only a year later by The Walking Dead ("don't dead, open inside") comic, provides the opportunity to be exposed to an empty London. Well, mostly empty.

Technically it opens with the stupid eco kids ignoring the scientist warning them to not release the monkeys that they have infected with RAGE !!

The "reprieve" in this movie is terribly short. He gets to slurp a few cans of pop and is immediately introduced to a church full of dead bodies, and an infected priest, after which he is rescued and gets an explainer from a couple of crafty survivors -- Mark (Noah Huntley, Snow White and the Huntsman) and Selena (Naomie Harris, Skyfall). Mark dies not long after, cut into bits by a remorseless Selena, after getting bitten.

While fast zombies were not entirely new, nor were "not zombies at all" infected, this movie pulled them out of the B and Z grades into (almost?) mainstream movie focus. The existential dread of the hordes of shambling dead, never stopping, never falling down, was replaced by "OH SHIT RUN RUN RUN RUUUUUN !!" sheer terror. You would exhaust yourself, you would make mistakes, you were so easily infected, while they just came in numbers, not tiring, not easily hurt, a fallen one replaced by three more.

The movie flits from the terror of running to moments of safety and contemplation, even some levity. Despite all of England having fallen, the low budget lends itself to only the occasional crowd of the infected wandering the countryside. The survivors, who eventually include Frank (Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges) and his daughter Hannah, in Frank's trusty (and well stocked) cab, are given a destination, a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel, which no matter how tenuous, they have no choice but to cling to.

Of course, also cribbed by The Walking Dead, but nothing really new, the real challenge turns out to be other humans infected by nothing more than barbarism. They, soldiers camped out in a posh mansion, are thinking about more than just the next meal or surviving the incursions of the infected, but how they choose to deal with the future is far less than savoury. 

Did I find it as "ground breaking" as I did when I saw it in the cinema? No, not at all. It looks like a bad pirate copy. But its a solid story, a journey from A to B, from waking in fear, to finally sleeping with comfort and safety.

28 Weeks Later comes (initially) as a geeky contemplation of the backstory after the rage virus destroys the UK. They are just infected people and people have to eat, and despite us seeing the infected chomping down on necks, we never actually see them eating the people they attack. They either kill them and leave them lying, or infect them. Its more about the virus propagating itself, than nourishment. So then, the infected people will eventually starve, and die. After six months you can assume even the domino effect has burned itself out (a near dead infected bites a well-fed human creating a new cycle) combined with the severely reduced number of living people to actually infect, means ... they are all dead? 

The Americans assume as much, and having survived their own plague (the first movie mentions the virus appearing in NYC), they have come to London to setup a safe zone, and help repatriate British survivors who fled to the mainland. They still have to deal with the city full of dead bodies and the fear of someone being infected always looms, so the entire "safe zone" is one big armed camp full of check points, safety doors, rooftop snipers, patrolling helicopters, etc.

Our main characters come from a refugee camp in Spain, to the Isle of Dogs in London, isolated from the rest of the city by water and guarded bridges. There are homes, beds, food, clothing, water and electricity. They are Tammy (Imogen Poots, Green Room) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton [now THAT is a name], Salem Witch Doll), the children of Don (Robert Carlyle, Ravenous), a facilities manager in this area. The movie opened with Don hiding out with his wife and other survivors in a countryside house, until it falls, and a cowardly Don runs, instead of defending his wife. He carries the guilt of what he did, but does not admit to his children on how their mother died.

Buuuuut, if all the infected are dead, how can this be a sequel? We need the running and chasing! Oh, we have possibilities, like Dr. Scarlet (Rose Byrne, Insidious), an American doctor studying the disease and the measures the US army is putting in place. Don't they always have vials of infected blood stored badly for accidental exposure? No matter, what happens is more insidious. Don's wife Alice (Catherine McCormack, Braveheart) did not die; she was bitten but had natural immunity, and is now a carrier -- a half-mad, starving carrier when they find her. And when her husband comes to see her, barely believing what he is seeing, desperate for forgiveness, she gives him the kiss he wants. We think she knows exactly what she is doing, as seconds later he turns and tears her throat out. Patient 0+1.

What follows is action thriller lunacy. The Americans have measures in place to deal with this, and they activate them. But the doors don't stay closed, the infected spread quickly, and Don seems to have preternatural intent, unlike the infected that came before him. To be honest, I was very annoyed how easily the American security measures fell. They herd all the survivors, some 15000 of them, into ... rooms. They would have probably done better letting them shelter in place while securing the doors to the towers the residents lived in. Or at least started by making stronger doors protected by more soldiers. No matter, all Hell breaks loose and not long after The General (Idris Elba, Luther) issues "code red", i.e. fuck it, kill em all -- infected, survivors, anyone on the ground. Oh, that didn't work either. Fuck it, just firebomb the entire fucking island. Oh, and gas the surrounding city, just to make sure.

Meanwhile, Don's wife is dead, Don is a monster, and his kids are being protected by Dr. Scarlett who has realized the kids might carry the same natural immunity as their mother. And Random Soldier Doyle (Jeremy Renner, Hawkeye) has decided the "kill em all" order is bad, and protects the small group as they escape the city. I know that Robert Carlyle was the Named Name for this movie, and they need him on camera as much as possible, but his Lone Infected act is just ... odd, and never explained. Eventually he catches up to his kids, reasons unknown, probably just Angry Dad Syndrome, and that weeds the survivors down to just the kids... who do escape, much to the detriment of the rest of the world.

Don't get me wrong, the action lunacy is well done. Its non-stop tension and terrible and tragic. But I would have preferred if they had double-down-ed on the geeky backstory contemplation. They could have maintained the "investigate the immunity" concept, highlighted how even the best security measures could be bypassed by foolish behaviour, had The General have emotional reactions to seeing his best laid plans fail, give hints as to why Don was an entirely new breed of raging monster, dealt more with the conflict between "protect the world" vs "save the innocent". Instead, they just all ran in terror and tore everything down.

Obviously, in that we are getting a 28 Years Later movie, the "wait out the starvation effect" factor becomes less reliable. And while it could be just a "the UK was abandoned entirely while the rest of the world recovered", I suspect the movie will be true post-apocalypse, the virus having finally reached everywhere and all measures failing and now.... a few struggling pockets of "civilization". But we know how people treat each other when things are at their worst, don't we?

Kent's recent post about it.

31 Days of Halloween: Viral

2016, Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman (Catfish) -- Netflix

If anything defined this year of Halloween movie watching, it was ... attention span. This night started as a watch of acclaimed ultra-low budget flick Skinamarink but was quickly identified that the 9000 opening atmospheric ultra-grainy video-camera shots of the ceiling were not going to keep our attention -- best left for another night. So, onto Netflix to find something.... fluffy. Not a lot of horror-comedies that caught our interest this year, so why not this old one that combines zombie-plague-creature-feature. I was also keen on seeing how a plague movie played out pre-COVID.

So, it begins in Obama's run as president, with some conversation about an epidemic that might or might not come to the US. The dialogue must have been about SARS but it all sounded sooooo familiar, and the playbook of how the government and the populace would deal with a quick quarantine was... predictive.

Emma (Sofia Black-D'Elia, Single Drunk Female) and Stacey (Lio Tipton, Lucy) are relatively new to town, having been moved there by Dad (Michael Kelly, Person of Interest) after some undefined family drama that has Mom absent. Emma is reserved and Stacey, with her blue streaked hair, is not. Like most of these movies, the emerging epidemic is happening on TV screens in the background mostly, but almost immediately Emma's friend Gracie is coughing up blood and the California desert suburban community is put under lockdown.

Grocery store stockup runs for food and toilet paper were replaced by a Dad run to the airport run to pickup Mom. The typical Dad stocked house has only.... condiments, so the girls have to fend for themselves. In very typical teen response to a lockdown, they go party in a partially finished home wherein the kids are attacked by the first fully infected kid, someone who Gracie coughed blood all over. And Stacey gets coughed upon.

At this point I should mention that this particular plague is parasite-based, worms in particular. There is some earlier commentary on dealing with bot fly larvae, but when Stacey gets a face full of blood we see a small worm quickly worm its way into her eye, which she, of course, denies happening. 

The rest of the movie follows the quick escalation of these movies. Dad never returns, the burb is cut off, soldiers are taking away the infected, Stacey's infection progresses slowly enough for her to hide it but the step-dad for Emma's love interest is not so subtle. By then, most of the burb is gone or infected and you can see the collapse of the US happening in the background. Yet, Emma believes she can save Stacey via the knowledge she gleaned from the science class she barely paid attention to. At least she didn't try to use Ivermectin, but in this case, it being an anti-parasitic for horses, it actually might have helped? 

Everything about this movie is horror-lite. The horrific zombie-scenes are scant, the wormy depictions are minor (wiggly worms coming out of ears & eyes), and the horde of chasing infected is relegated to one scene. Mostly the movie is about the love between two sisters, but even that is on the lite side. So, for our last night of Lack of Attention Span, it was a fine choice.