Horror Film Reviews: Quarantine A Remake Of Rec

This is a great horror film that I saw recently and it is one of them that is shot with the handheld cameras to get you more involved in the story, the characters and the action and it works on many levels like the other films that do it like Cloverfield and the Blair Witch.

The story starts when a news reporter is following a fire crew for the night, it begins with her interviewing some of the crew at the fire station with the hope of getting a call to follow them out on a job sometime within that night, this is the films usual character building moment where you attempt to work out who will get killed first when the madness begins, a little joking and banter all is the usual contrast before all hell breaks loose.

When they get the call, they arrive at an apartment building, were they recieved a call to gain entry into an old ladies apartment after she has been heard screaming her head off, they get in and you can see somethings wrong with her face, although the camera is shaking like mad as it would with a handheld camera, it soon works out that she has been infected with this mad rage rabies virus and she bites one of the policemen.

And the whole dilemma for the people who live in the apartment block and the others who have arrived to help out the situation, is that they get trapped in the building and the whole tension builds up as they are quarantined and they don't know if the outside police and authorities want them dead to contain the biological threat.

As with any film there are similarities to other films in the genre, such as 28 days later and the remake of the Dawn Of The Dead with fast running infected biting people in the neck and with the similarities come the Doh! moments of the film that I just found hard to believe, like when one moment they approached the old lady and her mouth is frothing and she won't answer them, this to me just screamed get the hell out of there!!

Also later in the film others get bitten and become ill and they just leave doors open and allsorts, any person in their right mind would lock the doors and keep the infected behind locked doors if the old lady at the beginning went mad and frothed at the mouth.

But these mistakes of humanity and lack of common sense aside, Quarantine is a good film, it delivers the tension through the use of the handheld cameras and the straight acting of the all the actors and you know the virus threat is contined which makes it all the more horrible for those who try to survive as there is nowhere to run, if it was me I would lock myself away alone in a room and wait, but such is the intelligence of actors who are told what to do in a film.

The ending was bleak and disappointing, although I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film yet, but the infected rabies virus nutters running around everywhere in a camera spotlight in the dark was quite scary but something we have seen before with 28 days, all in all it was a worthy film and one that I would recommend for horror film fans only!