A reporter and cameraman in Los Angeles are shadowing a pair of local firefighters. They are doing a little documentary piece and are also hoping to get in on some good live action at the same time. They get their wish when the fire department gets an emergency call from an apartment building claiming that an old lady is sick and is screaming violently. They report to this call and go check on the lady. The lady is all fucked up and sick and bloody. They try to help her but she attacks them instead and a melee ensues. After all of this action goes down, they discover that the building has been quarantined and nobody can exit the building. Meanwhile, whatever infected the old lady is probably still around within the building and who knows who already was infected and who wasn’t. Meanwhile the camera crew is recording every bit of this for posterity’s sake. Sound familiar? This, my friends, is Quarantine.

Apparently this movie is a remake. Hollywood is getting so good at this remake process that it has become second nature and they can do it quite elusively now. Great. I’ll take a penalty drink for not knowing that in advance. To be fair, I wasn’t the least bit interested in this movie beforehand, so I didn’t do any initial recon. The trailer just wasn’t doing it for me. The fact is, we wanted to go out to the movies last night and this was the only scary movie playing. Anyway, back to the review. The movie itself was all right. There was some good action and the movie had a good pace. Even before all the shit went down, it was pretty entertaining. The acting was good. The characters seemed real and were compelling. The kills were pretty graphic, but a lot of the potential gore was lost on the fucking camera flying everywhere (the whole movie was viewed from the vantage point of the news camera). The camera ended up being a distraction for me.

Now, some of the bad. The aforementioned camera shaking was really annoying. I’m not sure why people keep trying to make this work. Just fake it. They pulled it off pretty good in Diary of the Dead, and it didn’t lose any of the realism. Speaking of which, back to the realism. I’m sure that screaming and crying is really a pretty accurate response to the dismal situation that these people get put in, but holy shit, I don’t need to hear it incessantly. It stressed me out, and not in a good way. The main actress did a wonderful acting job (Jennifer Carpenter, the main character from The Exorcism of Emily Rose), it was just too much.

In addition, no skin of note was to be found in this movie either. Odd for an R Rated flick nowadays. Mercifully, that also meant sparing us nude man-ass in the firehouse shower room. Much props for that.

The film was also pretty simple in plot development: Go into a building, get trapped, don’t get killed. Once you figure out the situation, the rest of the movie becomes “just survive, baby”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can get old if you just end up running from one room to the next for 30 minutes. The movie was clocked in at only an hour and a half but to me it was about a half hour too long as a result. Yeah, that would make it an hour long movie.

They kinda tied stuff together at the end, but not really. There was some good potential there but they didn’t really expound much on it. Then they had the super cuddly cute “abrupt ending” and then it just went off, not unlike the comparable Blair Witch Project. Thanks. Now I’m supposed to think the movie was all artsy and profound because you ended it abruptly and made me put shit together on my own.

A lot of hype was made on the scene in the movie trailer of the girl getting pulled away, which I think is stupid. How big would that thing have to be in the trailer to pull that woman away that quickly and without any kind of initial struggle to get the ball rolling, so to speak? From a physics standpoint, not very likely. I call shenanigans, but people eat that kind of overdramatic unrealistic shit up, so why stop?

To summarize, the movie had fast paced action and was entertaining. The acting was good as well, albeit too good in some instances. The camerawork was distracting and annoying. At the very least, it’s a zombie movie, so if you want to go to the theaters and watch a zombie movie, go check it out. If you want a headache from frantic camerawork, go check it out also. If you want a better version of a similar movie, go check out Diary of the Dead or perhaps the original version of this movie ([Rec]) that everybody is raving about online. Apparently the movie is pretty good. I’ll keep an eye out for it. It’s not even a year old. Why remake a movie that isn’t even a year old? What the fuck? Why not show me the original?

I give this movie 6 out of 10 viruses that could take a week or 2 minutes to turn you crazy. It just depends on how the director wanted the flow of the movie to go at the time.

On a side note, I think I’m done with the Friday Night theater experience. Maybe I’m getting too old, but I’m tired of all the stupid fucking teens thinking that the audience wants to hear their witty, derogatory, often sexist remarks. It’s not funny that you screamed “Take that bitch!” when a zombie girl gets hit with an axe. I know all of your dipshit friends laughed, but trust me, it wasn’t funny. Thanks for sitting directly in front of me too, when half the theater was vacant.

This review was fueled by Oktoberfest brew and Coheed & Cambria. Speaking of zombies and Coheed, has anybody seen the video to their older tune “Blood Red Summer”? Very cool.

While I agree with Paynecraft that the hand-held ShakyCam(TM) in Quarantine was more like Blair Witch (annoying) than some more recent, slick versions (Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead), it didn't get up my nose too much, in large part because I appreciated how careful the camera work actually was. This wasn't just letting some actor fling a camera around, it was actually well planned out, and I think it paid off. (The periodic focus problems bugged me a lot more.)

One of my biggest beefs with movies these days is extreme over-editing (particularly fight scenes), so you just end up with a vague impression of some really fast stuff going on, but no sense of space or even movement. ShakyCam notwithstanding, you ended up with a really good sense of space in Quarantine - you're aware of the layout of the building, where the camera is and, generally, where the various characters are within that space. That made a lot of the subtle stuff they did really work. If you saw a figure moving in the background, you knew where it was going and filed it away, so you were anticipating future scares when the camera moved there later. As horror-mongers know, anticipation of the scare is far scarier than the scare itself. The contained space for almost all of the real action helped there.

Actually, because of all that, Quarantine reminded me of first-person-shooter games. (The actual games, not the crappy movie versions.) You spent this movie with real situational awareness - a feeling that you've learned the geography as you go through, and become hyper aware of where other things are moving in that space so you can dispatch them. The effect on me was a stronger identification with the leads, all the screaming notwitstanding, which is a pretty good accomplishment for a movie where people usually die because they are stupid.

I'd really like to have seen this with less recognizable actors, however, and I don't just say that because I know actors trying to make rent. I kept thinking "when did Richard Fish become a vet?" "Hey, Boris the Blade!" "Things never go well for Paxton's companions" and "Dexter's sister would kick this guy's butt." Even my husband said "look, the guy from That Thing You Do grew a pornstache." That doesn't usually bother me, so I chalk it up to the supposed "realism," but I could have suspended my disbelief (and gotten behind the ShakyCam) a lot more if I didn't recognize everyone from my Tivo queue.

Anyhow, I'd give it 7.5 out of 10 Spanish movies I can't find on Region 1 DVD yet.

With [REC] just being released in the latter part of 2007, Quarantine has to have the record for being the fastest remake ever made. If it does, sadly with the way current trends are going, I don’t think it is a record that will last very long.

For the most part, Quarantine is a scene-for-scene remake of [REC]. Even some of the same dialogue is used in certain scenes. There are a few minor differences sprinkled here & there, like a couple of new jump-scare scenes and the ethnicities of certain characters. There’s also a noticeable difference between the info provided to the viewer about the situation(s) going on, but I’ll discuss that further later on.

I’ll start with the strengths it has over [REC]. One is that the camera work is slightly better… for the most part. For those who have seen Quarantine and are saying “WTF!?! The shaky cam was horrible!” Trust me, it’s actually slightly worse in [REC], once again… for the most part. The shaky cam in Quarantine, while still more annoying than other movies that film using the same technique, seems more deliberate than it did in [REC].

The second strength (for those who don’t speak fluent Spanish) is that it is in English. You heard me right… I’m saying that is an actual strength. Normally, I almost always prefer to watch foreign films in their original language. There is emotion that’s captured in an actor’s original language that’s hard to duplicate in a voiceover. But the combination of horrendous shaky cam filming, plus trying to keep up with all the on-screen action while simultaneously reading subtitles became more than a little distracting. With Quarantine being an English remake, it took a lot of the work out of watching this movie, while preserving the raw emotion of an English-speaking cast.

And now for the weaknesses. Like I stated before, this is pretty much a scene-for-scene remake of [REC], so if you’ve already seen the original, then you will see everything coming, and I mean everything. This is why I don’t like remakes that are exactly identical to the original. Then again, I don’t like complete overhauls that are remakes in name only either (Day Of The Dead, anyone). Savini’s Night Of The Living Dead had a good balance of new & old, but I digress. Even if you haven’t seen [REC], a few of the more memorable scares are given away in the movie’s various trailers. Tsk tsk, marketing team.

Another problem is the information provided to the viewer. We get the complete 411 on the virus causing the mayhem a little beyond the halfway point. Considering the explanation given, not knowing would have been better than a full disclosure. While this was a case of too much information, the exact opposite happened at the film’s climax. I do not want to give away anything, but there was some important info left out of this version in the climax regarding the background of certain infected person that lessened the overall fear factor of the finale in comparison to [REC].

The remaining problems would be 1) the constant screaming & crying of Jennifer Carpenter in the last half of the movie and 2) the recognizability of a number of cast members. When you’re watching a movie that’s filmed like it supposedly takes place in the “real world,” it takes away from the overall effect when you recognize certain actors & actresses from your favorite shows on the screen. And last would be 3) timing. While [REC] was released in Europe with some marginal degree of freshness in the realm of handheld filming, the release of Quarantine in the US follows the recent release of such films as Diary Of The Dead & the blockbuster, Cloverfield. Needless to say, the freshness is gone.

In summation, Quarantine was a pretty decent film; not bad but not great either. If you are fortunate enough to acquire a copy of [REC] and were able to keep up with the subtitles, then you can pretty much skip Quarantine... it is for the most part the exact same thing. If not, it’s definitely worth a rent.

I give it 6 out of 10 scenes that could have been featured in the FOX special: When Dogs Attack.