This review has been a little while coming, and I humbly apologise for that.
The Blair Witch Project was overhyped but still a brilliant film, and one of the things that scared me every so slightly about the film was the huge success of the hand-held camera, something which I thought every film would then try to copy in an effort to reproduce the fear of TBWP. Rather surprisingly, most of Hollywood realised that the originality of TBWP was what made it successful and so they didn't jump on that particular band-wagon (ironically, the exception to that was the producers of TBWP who stayed on their own bandwagon and made a shit house sequel).
Cloverfield decided to adopt the same principle, and given that it has been a considerable time since the horror film genre had made use of the hand-held technique Cloverfield was considerably successful.
A year later and rather scarily it seems that Hollywood now has jumped on the bandwagon with Quarantine. What is rather more disturbing is that, not only does Hollywood start to flog the hand-held horse, but, ably demonstrating what Sean has described as a culturally bankrupt Hollywood, Quarantine is a remake of a Spanish film.
However, if the Ring proves nothing else, it's that America can actually take a foreign scary movie and actually make it even more scary. Sure, the American Ring doesn't have the same coherenet plot that the Japanese one does, but the American Ring is seriously scarier. And Quarantine is absolutely terrifying.
Effectively carrying the entire movie as a sophomore reporter following a fire department is Jennifer Carpenter, star of Dexter. I say carrying not in a nasty way, because it's not like the script, direction and acting all suck, but basically because Carpenter is on screen pretty much throughout the entire movie. The hand-held aspect comes from her cameraman following her and filming where she tells him to. It's a fairly big ask of Carpenter, but she not only does it effectively, but creates a character who is pretty damn sympathetic.
The rest of the cast include the likes of Jay Hernandez as one of the fire fighters and Dania Ramirez as, bizarrely, an opera singer. The cast is pretty likable, but full of very believable characters. I can actually feel a lot for the lawyer who gets pretty jack of the fire brigade and police telling him what to do when it becomes clear that even they don't know what is going on.
Rather surprisingly there is a pretty good explanation for why we have zombies running around the movie. Nowadays there is more and more desperation for zombies turning up in movies who aren't the undead. 28 Days Later provided us with a group of people infected by "Rage", but Quarantine opts for a slightly more obvious answer - a particularly virulent strain of rabies. When the vet recognises this, you can feel the dread in everybody - especially the woman who knows it was her dog that had it to start with.
Other little touches to amp up the fear include the building losing electricity and having their internet cut off so they can't contact the outside world, and then discovering that it is being reported that the building has been evacuated. Add to that some really nasty moments like crushing a rat to death and drilling into someone's head, and this movie is not for the squeamish.
I suspect this movie would have worked really well without the hand-held, which suggests that the movie is a good stand-alone film. However, add to that the hand-held aspect and it gives it that little more edge.
A truly terrifying film.
"A"
