Quarantine

It can't be easy being a TV celebrity. Just imagine being on camera constantly:  your every move scrutinized, criticized, and only sometimes legitimized. It's probably like being on that reality show, "Big Brother". Now imagine all those dimwits in the "Big Brother" house riddled with rabies, and you've got an idea of what you're in for with Quarantine.

Fortunately, the folks in Quarantine have a better script. Mercifully missing the likes of a hepped-up Dennis Hopper (see: House of Nine), this collection of characters are actually worth spending the rest of their lives with (which isn't long).

First up, we have Angela Vidal (the super-likable Jennifer Carpenter, of The Exorcism of Emily Rose and "Dexter" fame), a TV low-level local-affiliate reporter who gets all the goofy, fluffy assignments, the likes of which we doze through in the last five minutes of the 11 0'clock news.  She and her Johnny-on-the-spot cameraman, Scott Percival (Steve Harris, seldom-seen in the movie, but putting in a great performance nonetheless), are spending the night at a local fire station, thinking it'll be a quiet night where the biggest flames they will see is underneath the tea kettle in the LAFD kitchen.

Turns out there never is any fire, but there's plenty of brimstone when they descend into a living hell after a seemingly routine 911 call leads to the discovery of a mutant strain of rabies which turns people into raging killing machines and has an incubation period of nothing.

Jay Hernandez (Hostel) and Johnathon Schaech (Prom Night) play the lead firemen, and along with a cop who joins the fray (Columbus Short), the reporter and the cameraman find themselves sealed — quarantined — inside an apartment building that's harboring a deadly disease and an even worse adversary (Doug Jones, known as Hellboy's BFF and Guillermo del Toro's go-to ghoul). After the CDC effectively signs everyone's death warrant by locking them in and stationing snipers around the building to discourage escape, it's every person for themselves.

It's never really known who, or what, is to blame for the vile virus, but there are plenty of potential villains: every critter from a rat to a lapdog are suspected, and eventually everyone and everything become grist for the murderous mill (while it can't compare to Percy Wetmore's mouse-mush in 1998's The Green Mile, somebody does stomp a rodent pretty good in Quarantine — avert your eyes, animal-lovers!).

The suspense is super-stretched till the bitter end, but one should go into the theater forearmed with a couple of caveats: Quarantine doesn't reinvent the horror wheel, and as you exit the theater, you might feel as though you've been on a ferris-wheel. While the shaky-cam factor wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared, it's going to affect some people… still, it's a clever move on behalf of the filmmakers to exploit the conceit that the "lost footage" of the rabies ravage was shot by a professional TV newsman.

I doubt Quarantine will go down in the annals of horror history, but it's well-acted, fast-paced, plenty-gory, and it should most viewers vaccinated against boredom throughout its mere 89 minutes; it's well worth the price of admission and one anti motion-sickness tablet.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson

• Watch Horror.com's exclusive video interviews with the cast of Quarantine, and read our report from the set.