Director: John Erick Dowdle
A reporter (Jennifer Carpenter) is sent along with a cameraman to a fire station to film the activities of the firemen on the job. The crew has a pretty good time getting to know the firemen and doing things like sliding down the famous fireman’s pole.
The firemen get a call and they rush to a building with the crew tagging along where an old woman is sick and has apparently gone crazy and is attacking the other people. They soon realize that the old lady is infected with some disease and the people whom she bit start to fall ill and some even die.
While all this is happening, the building is sealed by the police with the residents, firemen and the reporting crew inside the building and these guys don’t have a clue about what’s going on. The infected people soon start attacking and biting the others and our reporter and cameraman are stuck in this mad frenzy. A resident tries to escape from a window, but he is shot dead by a sniper, indicating the graveness of the infection in the building.
It turns out that a strain of rabies that rapidly infects humans is what’s causing all this mayhem. The infected people turn into zombie like creatures and attack and eat other humans! (Yuck!) The concept of zombies may still be exciting to the film maker (gross makeup on some second rate artistes would do the job, eliminating the need to spend millions to animate some other scary creatures), but I can vouch that viewers hardly find the idea thrilling anymore.
The reporter and the cameraman survive till the end of the movie, the cameraman is killed first and the movie ends with the reporter being dragged away into the darkness.
The movie is shot from the cameraman’s point of view; everything is as seen through his lens. The last few minutes have the camera in the night mode. It was quite chilling to watch the movie, it’s good that there wasn’t too much of gore but the suspense wasn’t entirely effective; I never once got startled even though I was watching it all alone at night.
I thought the lead actress overacted in many places. In one situation, when things start to go really really bad in the movie, she starts panicking and trembling with fear in such a fashion that I found this part an ordeal to sit through and was irritated to watch all the over-action.
Verdict: An ok movie that can be watched for time pass. Not really scary.
My Rating: 2/5
No comments:
Post a Comment