Movie Review: Quarantine

Quarantine is an American remake of a 2007 Spanish film REC and the first of the two horror movies I’ve been looking forward to in the month of October, the second of which being Saw V.  Find out what I thought about Quarantine after the break… or don’t, it’s your choice really.

Quarantine follows a reporter and her cameraman as they shadow a pair of firefighters for a night time news show.  While responding to an alarm in an apartment building, it is shut down by the C.D.C., trapping the reporter, her cameraman, the two firefighters, and a handful of other people inside of the building with a virus much like the rage virus from 28 Days Later which slowly begins to infect people until all hell breaks loose.

Much like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, Quarantine is shot from the perspective of a video camera.  I’ll admit that Quarantine does some new things with this shaky cam that I haven’t seen before such as using the camera as a bludgeon to kill an infected person, but after seeing a movie shot this way it turns me off watching another like it for a little bit.  Prior to watching Quarantine I felt like watching Diary of the Dead again but now I feel that I’m going to wait on that some more because I’ve had my fill of shaky cam.

The movie starts painfully slow treating us to scene after scene of the reporter spending time in the firehouse cracking lame jokes.  I was reminded of Cloverfield and its drawn out party sequence in the beginning.  I started to forget that I was even watching a horror movie, although it all fairness very few horror movies start out with all guns firing.  It seems to be a convention of the genre to spend time building up characters that only die gruesome deaths a couple scenes down the road.

The boring intro is completely redeemed later on when the action starts up.  Once this movie gets its momentum it never slows down until the end.  Scenes later in the movie when the virus has broken loose feature infected attack after infected attack.  As soon as the characters are done killing one, another one is already on their tail.

This is very much a movie where I would reccomend not questioning the story too much.  Much like many other horror movies, the judgement of the characters is ridiculous at times, and you’ll find yourself screaming at the screen because you cannot believe how stupid some people act.  Its also best not to wonder why the virus takes quite a while to take over the first few people but later in the movie it’s a matter on minutes?  Or why the little girl was infected for so long and didn’t freak out until the characters realized she was?  Or why in the scene ripped straight out of The Grudge at the end there was a young boy trapped in the attic?

I would definitely reccomend seeing this in the theaters while you have the chance.  As with many movies, it’s not going to be the same experience on home video as it is on the big screen.  This movie met all of the expectations I set for it and did not waver up or down at all.

Also, I’m going to get so pissed if I hear people refer to this as a zombie movie.  This is not a zombie movie.  28 Days Later is not a zombie movie.  Do not call them zombie movies, because THEY AREN’T ZOMBIES.