Not sleeping

I'm getting ready to work the overnight shift over the weekend and consequently, I'm up in the middle of the night with the hopes that I will sleep well into the morning tomorrow. I have turned off Gmail notifier so that it doesn't bother me, as well as the phone. I find it funny that Gmail notifier was my primary concern vs. the phone, even though the phone is much more likely to wake me up.

Anyway, I usually worry about not being able to stay awake on the night before I start the overnight shifts, but tonight, no worries, because I just got done watching the movie Quarantine, which was, from what I understand, pretty much a frame-by-frame remake of the Spanish horror movie REC which had been released about 6 months before Quarantine.

Holy. Crap.

I know that the movie was out last year, but I never saw it until just tonight. Here's the trailer but be warned, it gives away all the best bits. (Heidi, not that you would, but don't watch this trailer.)



The basic gist of the story is that news reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman are doing a segment on the night shift of the L.A. fire department. They end up on a call to an apartment complex in which they are inexplicably sealed in by the police department. Through a turn of events I won't spoil here, much zombie carnage ensues. As I was watching this movie, I was kind of silently (and sometimes not so silently) mocking it for not being particularly scary and having characters that are, as my wife would refer to them, too stupid to live. You don't really get to know them all that well - some of them I never did learn their name - but that's hardly the point as they are pretty much Bantha zombie pudu and you know it.

Very Blair Witch-ish in nature, I found myself liking the movie in spite of its paper thin plot and idiotic characters. And then, in the last 20 minutes, it gets VERY scary. It doesn't hurt that the lights go out, and that everything is seen in shadows. Even the light on the camera is broken (in one of the movie's best scares) and then the rest of the movie is shot in night vision. It's these last 20 minutes that really redeem the film and keep it from being just another forgettable scary movie.

It's a pretty capable zombie flick, even though one could argue that they aren't really zombies. Rather, they are much more in the vein of the 28 Days Later zombies - infected rather than reanimated dead. These distinctions matter, especially to people like me.

So now that it's 2:30AM, I need to try to sleep. But every time I close my eyes, I see those images in the night vision camera and, well, hopefully I can get SOME sleep.

Watch it - it's streaming on Netflix for those of you that do the Netflix thing.