Movie Review: Quarantine 2: Terminal

Dark Things Quarterly, the magazine I was going to do movie reviews for has been closed down. So I thought I would just post the reviews I had done on here over the next few weeks. Here we go...

Quarantine 2: Terminal

The 2008 film Quarantine was remarkable in its…well, unremarkableness. I can tell you that I watched the movie, that I didn’t hate it, and that I didn’t like it. I think the movie was about a plague. That is about all I remember. The movie was neither good enough nor bad enough to for me to remember a single thing about it.

When I heard there was a sequel Quarantine 2: Terminal, I almost didn’t pick it up, mediocre horror just isn't my thing, but part of the product description pulled me in. This is what got me:

“…Now, aboard Flight 318, the first symptoms begin to show. As the infection begins to take root, innocent passengers suddenly transform into terrifying, bloodthirsty killers…”

It is pretty hard to resist terrifying, bloodthirsty killers. So I gave it a shot. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much but I was pleasantly surprised. Here is the how the movie graded out.

PLOT

The plot was entertaining but was nothing extraordinary and can be completely summarized in those two lines of product description. A disease gets loose on a plane, the infected become crazy zombie-like killers. There were a couple of good scares and just enough action and gore to keep me entertained and watching. Grade: C+

DIRECTING

Another thing that kept me watching was the filming of the movie. Director, John Pogue, did a nice job filming this one. So many directors these days are trying to be "unique" or "edgy" that it is nearly impossible to watch their movies. Quarantine 2 did not suffer from this problem. Grade: B

ACTING

Finally no movie review is complete with mentioning the acting, the biggest pitfall of horror movies. I didn't recognize a single name but I did recognize a few faces, and my Google-fu tells me that many of the actors have also been in an episode or two of TV shows that I watch. No on in this movie is going to win the Oscar for best actor, but they all did a good job. I thought most of the characters were believable and Mercedes Masohn has an awesome performance playing the freaked out, but determined, flight attendant, Jenny. Grade: B-

Overall Grade: B-

Summary: Quarantine 2: Terminal is no masterpiece but it is a fun and entertaining movie. See this one if you have nothing else to watch.

Not a Pro

Well it has officially been one year since I signed my contract with Faepublishing to have them publish my short story, The Last Dragon. It was my first pro paying sale, but I am assuming the story will never get published now. Their website is gone and has been for months and I have found numerous blogs from authors who were accepted and never published.

Here is the weird part, at least in my opinion, I signed a contract, they did edits and sent me them to look at, and I got paid. I understand running out of money and going under, but they had at least one story paid for and ready to go. Weird.

The contract says that the rights to my story are mine once again, since the story had not been published in the one year since I signed the contract.

Oh, well I guess I have the rights to an unpublished story and $125. I just can't say that I have had a professional sale anymore. It is still the most money I have made off of any one piece of writing, but I really wanted to have a pro sale in my cover letter to other publishers.

As far as writing goes I am playing around with different ways of outlining and starting all kinds of novels just to see if I like them. I am still writing one main novel, which I really need to find a title for. My new years resolution is going well 400 words a day is a lot easier than any other quota I have given myself in the past, I have actually met this one so far and it is almost a month into the new year!

A New Year

Happy New Year!

Hello, everybody. Sorry I haven’t posted sooner but it has been a busy new year. As some of you have probably read over at the PHP website, over Christmas my wife and I discovered that we are going to have twins in August. We are both really excited, but I have a bunch of stuff to do around the house before August, and with the Summer Reading program in June and July I really need to try to get everything done by May.

I have to make the spare bedroom into a nursery, move the spare bedroom to my office, move office down the stairs and across the house into a room we were using for storage, move my wife’s office into another room we were using for storage, make her old office into a new living room(we picked the smallest room in the entire house to be our living room and we are going to need more room where we hang out), move the stuff from the storage rooms out to the shed or out to the dumpster, paint the old living room…anyway there’s more stuff but I’m sure you get the idea.

Basically “We” decided to rearrange the entire house, I put the quotes around we because while technically I was there, I just said things like “yes honey” and “that’s good idea”. In short I have had a pretty busy few weeks, but I am not minding it at all because I am so excited about the twins.

On the writing front I started yet another new project. It kind of seems like that is all I did in 2011. Every month or so I would start something new. But I made a new year’s resolution to finish writing something before I start anything else and to write at least 400 words a day. I figure 400 words a day is easy, takes me about thirty minutes or so, and I can finish a novel in a little over six months. Plus it is a little slower than the nanowrimo pass so my writing should be a little more intelligible.

I better get to writing.

Oh, and I won the super bowl in one of my fantasy football leagues.