In what seemed like a major downgrade from the $12 million budgeted John Erick Dowdle-directed Quarantine, John Pogue (screenwriter of U.S. Marshals, The Skulls, and Ghost Ship, among others) was handed the reins to a $4 million sequel. Quarantine 2: Terminal was quietly dropped into a couple of theaters in June of this summer and then rushed straight to DVD.
It’s a shame too, since the film is an effective cheapie that effectively blows out of the water variety of lesser B-movies that get an unwarranted theatrical release. Despite chickening out of a starker premise early on, Quarantine 2 is a competently made, decently acted and mostly smartly written film.
I have to confess I thoroughly did not enjoy the first Quarantine (here’s a review I wrote for my college paper back in ’08). The only good thing to come out of that movie was that I got to see it with my current girlfriend. I wasn’t sold on the shaky-cam aesthetic (or maybe I was just tired of it), I hadn’t seen [REC], and I found the first film a collection of cheap scares barely held together by a story that only picked up when we were fed clues about the viral infection that gripped an apartment building, transforming its denizen into flesh-hungry foes.
The first smart move Quarantine 2 makes is picking up right where we left off, moving from the apartment building to a plane readying for take-off. Destined to be our unfortunate lead, Jenny (Mercedes Masöhn), a flight attendant with a pilot father, greets the herd of passengers that we know will be thoroughly thinned out in time. It’s an eclectic cast that immediately ratchets up some tension – you have the requisite teen and the less-used foreign couple, but then Pogue (who also penned the script) includes a pregnant woman and a man with Parkinson’s. Easy targets, you may say, balking at the immorality of utilizing a pregnancy and a disability for cheap thrills, but Quarantine 2 never goes violently overboard, rather disappearing the cast in sudden strokes, some elegant, others cliché.
It’s a wonder that the film works at all, given that it squanders a fantastic idea from the get-go – Quarantine on a plane would have been a much better film if pulled off. Sure, you may have heard of (or even seen) Snakes on a Plane or Flight of the Living Dead, that specific branch of horror films in confined spaces remains largely without a champion (please don’t bring up Devil). Had the film detailed the tussles of a small group of passengers with fast, strong adversaries while government agents attempted to intercept the plane (or perhaps there was one onboard, fully aware of the infection and sent to keep watch, report findings, and amscray with evidence), Quarantine 2 could have been a memorable excursion from horror norms. As it is, the plane makes an emergency landing, and the crew and passengers find themselves trapped in a terminal on lockdown as security forces swarm around it.
The rest of the film plays out in the dark recesses of the terminal, which admittedly is quite imposing and unpleasant with the lights down. Pogue gets a lot of mileage out of disposing of the conventional means of escaping, as characters try a variety of exits, none of them useful. As the virus takes hold and Jenny attempts to keep the piece, Henry (Josh Cooke) and his role in all of this becomes more prominent. I won’t spoil it here, but suffice to say with a few choice lines and a decent performance from Cooke, Pogue builds a franchise that could go on indefinitely, with low-budget features being cranked out on a yearly basis. It’s an us-vs.-them story you’ve seen before but there’s still plenty of places talented filmmakers could take it.
The rest of the film plays out in the dark recesses of the terminal, which admittedly is quite imposing and unpleasant with the lights down. Pogue gets a lot of mileage out of disposing of the conventional means of escaping, as characters try a variety of exits, none of them useful. As the virus takes hold and Jenny attempts to keep the peace, Henry (Josh Cooke) and his role in all of this becomes more prominent. I won’t spoil it here, but suffice to say with a few choice lines and a decent performance from Cooke, Pogue builds a franchise that could go on indefinitely, with low-budget features being cranked out on a yearly basis. It’s an us-vs.-them story you’ve seen before but there’s still plenty of places talented filmmakers could take it.
The final stretch of the film is satisfying and even a tad bit emotional, since no one in the cast sticks out as a poor performer. The desperation is evident and the clashes between people realistic, so the eventual survivors making their way out is fraught with a desire to see them survive, to outrun the odds, despite the fact that on the outside, they will be hunted and most likely killed. I’ve yet to see a film follow one of these survivors immediately after they make it out, not years down the line, but moments after – Quarantine 2 ends with a obvious hint at a sequel, so… Quarantine 3 next summer then?
DVD Bonus Features
Nada.
"Quarantine 2: Terminal" is on sale August 2, 2011 and is rated R. Horror, Thriller. Written and directed by John Pogue. Starring Mercedes Masohn, Josh Cooke, Mattie Liptak.
