A slow, slow, slow film that is as unconvincing as it is boring. Made as a television film in Canada, its US video release saw it get an R-rating, probably because of one unexciting, ill-timed love scene that featured a quick side peek at the heroine's boobs. Well, any kids that couldn't get a hold of the film because of its rating should be thankful; other people who weren’t so lucky can probably at least say "I haven't slept this well in years."
Not that the basic idea is bad, but the script itself has a thousand holes in it and the budget is embarrassingly obvious. Director Charles Wilkinson, who also co-scripted the film, was obviously inspired by the problem of AIDS and based his story around an unnamed virus. Nowhere in Quarantine is it revealed how exactly the virus is transmitted, it merely seems that anyone and everyone can possibly have it. In the near future—in Germany, the film is shown on late night TV as Escape 2001—people who are identified as having the virus are first quarantined and then trucked off to be exterminated. The "Final Solution," so to say, in an attempt to control an uncontrollable problem, presented two or three times in similar scenes of depressed, oppressed people boarding trucks as some unseen fog machine goes wild somewhere in the background. The heroine (Beatrice Boepple, who got to enjoy a creative death as Amanda in Nightmare on Elm Street 5) makes her appearance on a bike (!) wearing a Darth Vador mask when she steals an entrance pass to the uninfected area of the city; this theft allows for a rip-roaring, one-of-a-kind, truly breathtaking, unbelievably nerve wracking chase scene through huge, massive throngs of people playing percussion music on pipes and trash cans.
Anyway, she is out to kill Senator Edgar (Jerry Wasserman), the power crazed, dictatorial politician who seems to head the witch hunt against the infected... though he seems less a crazed fascist than simply a hammy actor. Of course, she screws up and manages to escape only by forcing Spencer (Garwin Sanford), a tall, nerd computer specialist (who is first seen repairing a violin?) to help her. He takes her home to his huge wet dream of an apartment, where it is soon revealed that he is not only having an affair with the senator’ wife, but is also working on the ultimate of all computers, one especially designed to hunt down the infected. (This wonder computer looks surprisingly like an old and repainted but slightly dusty Ms. Packman machine.) Ever so yawningly slow, it is revealed that what our heroine really wants to do is save her Daddy, a good doctor who headed an illegal clinic that treated the infected. Spencer tries to interfere on her behalf and through his own stupidity and the influence of the nasty police chief ends up getting stuck outside amongst the disenfranchised, where he gets the shit beaten out of him. So they ride a horse to the summer house of the senator’s wife for refuge, the nasty cop on their trail. Soon, the wife is dead, there is a third-rate car chase, an idiotic love scene and some other stuff that one can easily fast forward through, all leading up to the predictable, oh so very, very, very convincing climax.....
Quarantine is a good idea gone terribly wrong featuring sets as cheesy as the acting, a story that holds no water, an uninspired if not by the number direction and a logic better suited for a Saturday morning animated series than a movie—though, in truth, the average Saturday morning cartoon is probably much more interesting....
Not that the basic idea is bad, but the script itself has a thousand holes in it and the budget is embarrassingly obvious. Director Charles Wilkinson, who also co-scripted the film, was obviously inspired by the problem of AIDS and based his story around an unnamed virus. Nowhere in Quarantine is it revealed how exactly the virus is transmitted, it merely seems that anyone and everyone can possibly have it. In the near future—in Germany, the film is shown on late night TV as Escape 2001—people who are identified as having the virus are first quarantined and then trucked off to be exterminated. The "Final Solution," so to say, in an attempt to control an uncontrollable problem, presented two or three times in similar scenes of depressed, oppressed people boarding trucks as some unseen fog machine goes wild somewhere in the background. The heroine (Beatrice Boepple, who got to enjoy a creative death as Amanda in Nightmare on Elm Street 5) makes her appearance on a bike (!) wearing a Darth Vador mask when she steals an entrance pass to the uninfected area of the city; this theft allows for a rip-roaring, one-of-a-kind, truly breathtaking, unbelievably nerve wracking chase scene through huge, massive throngs of people playing percussion music on pipes and trash cans.
Anyway, she is out to kill Senator Edgar (Jerry Wasserman), the power crazed, dictatorial politician who seems to head the witch hunt against the infected... though he seems less a crazed fascist than simply a hammy actor. Of course, she screws up and manages to escape only by forcing Spencer (Garwin Sanford), a tall, nerd computer specialist (who is first seen repairing a violin?) to help her. He takes her home to his huge wet dream of an apartment, where it is soon revealed that he is not only having an affair with the senator’ wife, but is also working on the ultimate of all computers, one especially designed to hunt down the infected. (This wonder computer looks surprisingly like an old and repainted but slightly dusty Ms. Packman machine.) Ever so yawningly slow, it is revealed that what our heroine really wants to do is save her Daddy, a good doctor who headed an illegal clinic that treated the infected. Spencer tries to interfere on her behalf and through his own stupidity and the influence of the nasty police chief ends up getting stuck outside amongst the disenfranchised, where he gets the shit beaten out of him. So they ride a horse to the summer house of the senator’s wife for refuge, the nasty cop on their trail. Soon, the wife is dead, there is a third-rate car chase, an idiotic love scene and some other stuff that one can easily fast forward through, all leading up to the predictable, oh so very, very, very convincing climax.....
Quarantine is a good idea gone terribly wrong featuring sets as cheesy as the acting, a story that holds no water, an uninspired if not by the number direction and a logic better suited for a Saturday morning animated series than a movie—though, in truth, the average Saturday morning cartoon is probably much more interesting....
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