Director: John Eric Dowdle
Year: 2008
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Shadowing a firefighting company, a reporter and her crew find their call to an apartment complex leaves everyone stranded inside by a government quarantine against a strange viral infection that turns its ravenous, cannibalistic killers and must try to get out of the building alive.
Review:
This one was pretty much deadlocked all the way through with good points and bad ones. What really helps this one is the sense of realism that runs throughout here, not only with the opening in the firehouse along with the way they handle the call at the apartment to the confusion once it starts as the panic that occurs from the shutdown of the services and then sealing off the group inside with some intense preventative measures to ensure that which makes for some really good times.
Beyond this, there's more to like here in the second half, which picks up the action even more as the ravenous infections begin spreading and continue throughout the entire section. This basically starts with the initial investigation of the infected tenants’ apartment and resulting attack on the firefighters there which is fine enough, but once the few infected begin streaming out of the darkness this one takes off considerably with the ambush by the maid, the hallway attack by the rapid dog and finally the wild confrontation with the infected crewmember attacking which all makes for truly exciting times here.
Once the containment crew arrives, there’s a lot more to like as the close-up capture of the testing system which leads into the breakdown attack and gets the others loose inside the building as there’s a wide-ranging sense of fun here with how the infected keep running after the group left running around the stairways and hallways in numerous, near-continuous attacks. That the attacks are plain brutal and graphic is another nice touch that helps sell the viciousness and the brutality of the kills here, which are more than enough here to hold this up against the flaws.
The biggest issue here is the film’s main gimmick of using the singular vision camera-work in here. It was just really hard to see through that endlessly aggravating shaking cam used, which never once did anything positive for the film, as that leaves the viewer without some sense of what happened or what's going on. It’s a tactic that doesn’t give any sense of what happened in the frame by jerking this around and disorients the action so much during the pivotal parts of the film.
The other flaw here is the origin of the virus was a little weak and could've been better as there’s some perfect opportunity to show this off at the end up in the attic only to leave all the clues responsible for figuring this out to be left at such an angle that it’s impossible to make out what happened here. This also came out so late that even if there’s a definitive answer, it is quite late to matter. All in all, it was a little uneven but was still good enough to matter.
Overview: ***.5/5
An enjoyable enough if slightly flawed found-footage remake, this one comes about rather well for what it is while still being slightly let down by several issues from what it could've been. Those with an interest in this style, are curious about the differences from the original, or are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here while most others turned off by these factors should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment