Movie Review: Quarantine

The rash of remakes just keep on coming and this time they neglected to even wait long enough for the original to be released in a lot of places before making their own version for English-speaking audiences. As a huge fan of the original it’s hard to not compare the two, pretty impossible actually, and this is just one of the reasons why Quarantine fails more than it succeeds.

While filming a tour of a fire station, a TV reporter and her cameraman get taken on a call to a city apartment. What seems at first to be a fairly routine call soon turns into something much worse as an outbreak of a mysterious virus occurs which turns anyone infected into bloodthirsty killers.

All of these remakes of foreign films can justly be compared to video game adaptations; it’s not the fact that they’re remakes but the very simple fact that history has shown us that 99% of them turn out to be flat out bad. Up until now the majority have been remakes of Asian horrors, such as The Grudge, The Ring and Premonition to name but a few (all of which considered to be vastly inferior to their respective originals). Quarantine shows that Hollywood doesn’t just limit themselves to that corner of the world; oh, no, they’ll remake anything and everything as long as they think it will make them money.

This particular remake is based on a Spanish horror film from earlier this year called [REC], short-term for the record function on a camera. It was undoubtedly one of the most effective horrors to come along in years; fast, frenetic, heart-pounding and most importantly of all uniquely terrifying. So although the notion of a remake infuriates, you can’t exactly blame them for wanting to take something of such high quality and try to translate it to an American setting for English-speaking audiences. The trouble is, though, is that they seem to have thrown a hell of a lot more money at this one than the original certainly had. As a result everything looks slick and manufactured, what you would recognise as what Hollywood films usually are nowadays. This then diminishes the level of fear felt while watching because you’re always aware that it’s just a movie.

Article Author: Ross Miller

I am a film critic and blogger, and have been so since late 2007, going from starting my own movie review website, Movie World (which is still running), and then moving on to writing for various movie blogs.

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