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'Quarantine'

Rating:

BY RAFER GUZMÁN | rafer.guzman@newsday.com

7:07 PM EDT, October 10, 2008

For Los Angeles television reporter Angela (Jennifer Carpenter) and her faithful cameraman Scott ( Steve Harris), it was supposed to be a fun and fluffy feature on the local firehouse -- an interview with the chief, some tomfoolery on the fire pole, maybe even a real alarm.

But when the crew, headed by hunky fireman Jake (Jay Hernandez), answers a call from an apartment building, what they find is not exactly a treed kitten. It's an old woman foaming at the mouth and growling like a rabid Doberman -- and boy, does she have a set of canines.

That's the basic set-up of "Quarantine," an admittedly unoriginal horror flick that also turns out to be a rollicking good time. Its basic skeleton comes from the zombie classic "Night of the Living Dead" (complete with angelic little girl and overprotective mother), and its style is a blatant rip-off of "The Blair Witch Project" and the more recent " Cloverfield," with the entire film seen through Scott's camera lens. In a moment of weakness, it even swipes the night-vision climax of "Silence of the Lambs." The filmmakers clearly have no shame, and neither should you.

Based on last year's Spanish-made "REC" and Americanized by the highly capable director John Erick Dowdle (who co-wrote with his brother Drew), "Quarantine" compensates for its clichés by making the most of its single-viewpoint shtick. Many of the scenes are elaborately choreographed in impressively long takes (or maybe it's a case of sneaky editing), with zombies springing out of the background and bloody bodies dropping out of nowhere.

The self-referential, documentary style might seem to qualify "Quarantine" as a thoroughly modern movie aimed at viewers raised on reality television and MySpace. But the technique goes back at least as far as Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," which told its tale through letters and diary entries rather than digital video. "Quarantine" does add one new twist: At one point, the camera itself becomes a hilariously effective zombie-fighting weapon. Thank goodness for technology.

PLOT A small apartment building turns into a festering Petri dish for a rampaging disease

CAST Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez, Steve Harris.

LENGTH 1:26

BOTTOM LINE What this formulaic horror flick lacks in originality it makes up for with style, humor and more than one well-timed "boo!"