Quarantine 2: Terminal
After my mammoth session with [●REC], [●REC]², Quarantine and Quarantine 2: Terminal, I continued my survey of killer germ movies with both versions of The Crazies, … 28 days later and … 28 weeks later, the 1970s and 2000s series of Survivors, The Stand, The Cassandra Crossing, Outbreak, And the Band Played On, The Andromeda Strain, The Satan Bug, Carriers, Plague, Warning Sign, I Am Legend, and every single SARS, bird flu and pandemic TV movie ever made. This is what I have gleaned …
1: It’s always someone’s fault: some unethical businessman smuggling in an exotic pet … some researcher who thinks that genesplicing ebola and the common cold into one new super-infectious organism is a really neat idea … some bureaucrat who turns down the dedicated doctor’s funding application for vaccine research.
2: You know it’s really serious when they run a ‘days since first infection’, ‘number of infectees’, ‘percentage of fatalities’ tally at the bottom of the screen every few scenes.
3: Don’t get on a plane if anyone’s coughing. Also, avoid flights with singing nuns, alcoholic movie stars and priests who’re struggling with lost faith.
Most of all, never fly with a fictional airline. If it’s a made-up logo on the side of the plane, you’re all doomed.
4: Government men in decontamination suits are never there to help you. At best, they’ll administer lethal injections. At worse, they’ll shoot you on sight.
The authorities never try to save lives in movie outbreaks. They always write off every sick citizen as expendable. Not like in the real world. Never trust anyone in a mask.
5: Real diseases have incubation periods of days or even weeks. Movie diseases go from first contact through slight sniffle to foaming homicidal mania with unsightly pustules within minutes – if not seconds.
Only … 28 days later notices that this rapid incubation period means an outbreak is likely to burn out as quickly as it starts and thus limits the spread of the apocalypse bug.
6: Dedicated doctors who have to step up and combat an outbreak are always troubled by personal problems just when all their attention should be on their microscopes and petri dishes – an unruly teenage daughter is especially common, but erratic elderly parents, a spouse out to take them in a vicious divorce or a boss who wants to fire them for slacking aren’t unknown.
After the crisis, all will be forgiven, especially if the serum developed at the last minute has cured the annoying loved one or workmate.
7: Real sick people just lie down moaning, watch daytime TV and run through boxes of paper tissues. Movie sick people develop uncanny strength, become agile and super-active, lose all human intelligence, and take to the streets to bite people.
8: Hot action babe heroines always have an immunity. And no compunction about battering or slashing sick people to death for the betterment of mankind.
9: A surprising number of insane billionaires think that unleashing a genocidal bug which will wipe out everyone in the world except their chosen followers would be a good idea.
In the post-plague world, would there be any real use for an insane billionaire whose fortune doesn’t count any more?
10: Real diseases get stupid common names like measles, bird flu and swine flu. Movie diseases are called something cool like Rage, the Andromeda Strain or Code Name Trixie.
Quarantine 2: Terminal, recently released on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, is the latest zombie film to inspire Kim Newman and his motivation for compiling this Top 10.