"Quarantine" is a remake of the Spanish film "Rec", which has gained a large cult following and even plenty of critical appreciation. I unfortunately was busy during "Rec"'s only screening in my city so I went into "Quarantine" without being able to compare it to the original film. I imagine the original film is fairly similar, given that the film is shot from the perspective of a news crew, but the acting and writing may very well be quite different, and perhaps better.
I suppose it would be incorrect to call "Quarantine" a zombie movie, as the 'zombies' are still technically alive, but considering what the 'zombies' do in the movie they are still basically zombies. They bite, they groan, and do other zombie-like things. The movie opens with a news crew shooting a special on the local fire department. Late that night the department gets a call, they respond, the news crew and the firemen enter the building where there is some rabies-like disease spreading and end up trapped in there, 'quarantined' if you will. The first few scenes at the fire department have already been compared to the similarly uneventful opening scenes in "Cloverfield", but Drew Goddard's script for that film was far, far superior to this one, which is packed with stilted, unrealistic dialogue. Of course, people complained about the characters in "Cloverfield" being annoying, because they could have been real people, they talked like real people, and were annoying like most real people are, so I imagine those people will be pleased that we get CHARACTERS here. Yep, CHARACTERS defined by the character outlines. Simply not very good writing.
All that said, the first stages of the film are actually quite engaging and suspenseful, and the development of the events at the quarantined building is very intriguing, and the first few kills are pretty surprising and fun. Of course, the camera does shake quite often in "Quarantine", but other than the last half hour which sees the movie degenerate from suspenseful horror thriller to what a faithful "House of the Dead" movie might have looked like (it literally largely consists of zombies randomly appearing in front of the camera, and at one point I instinctively pressed on my coke bottle; I must have been subconsciously reminded of the experience of playing that game at arcades), with all the motion you can expect from that sort of perspective, the camera is relatively un-shaky compared to "Blair Witch" or "Cloverfield". The most relevant comparison is to "Diary of the Dead" (both zombie movies shot this way), and there's really no question that "Quarantine" is superior in almost every way imaginable to Romero's latest (disappointing) effort.
"Quarantine" gets off to a reasonable start, picks up some real momentum, then turns into a live action video game, and as everyone knows it's no fun watching others playing a video game, and the lead actress' histrionics get quite aggravating. The movie on the whole is short enough to be harmless and entertaining, but given the quality of the concept and the middle section of the film, I'm disappointed that the director and writers missed the chance to make this a genuinely chilling and claustrophobic film, and it really ends up being more an action film than a horror film.
Oh, and there's an absolutely shameful ripoff of the greatest 'jump' moment of all time from Robert Wise's 1963 film "The Haunting".
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