Quarantine - Foreign Fimmaking Sanitized For Your Protection

Quarantine

Here we go again – another, pointless shot-for-shot remake. But as far as pointless shot-for-shot Hollywood remakes go, this has got to be one of the most pointless so far given the film it’s remaking, [REC], wasn’t even a year old when they rushed this one out.

Really the only difference I can see between this film and [REC] is that Quarantine is in English, and set in Los Angeles. Other than that, the films are so close that even in an American context, the film has been Spanish-ized (e.g. the Spanish style architecture of the apartment building setting, and even Latin-American characters like ‘Mrs. Espanoza’).

Aside from some of it’s edginess burnished off by slightly slicker Hollywood production values, it essentially has all the same weaknesses of [REC] (q.v.), but all the same strengths too. For example, by using the actual camcorder footage as the storytelling device, the film is able to use justifiable jump cuts to avoid covering transitions in time and place with walking and talking. This really helps ramp up the tension.

As usual with any good zombie film (really it’s a ghoul film, but that’s a discussion for another time), it's less about the zombie attack as it is about how the humans react to it.

Some things new to this version include having a vet actually in the building which allows for a better explanation of 'rabies', as well as the immediately dating bit of a rabbit ears TV. A couple minor points of interest to gore fans is a zombie dog in elevator scene and a zombie beat to death on camera – with the camera. But for every point in it’s favor (over the original) there’s one against it – for example, the TV host covering camera lens with hand and saying 'turn it off' – something that is just so out of character.

Overall, maybe it’s because I've seen it before, but Quarantine just doesn't seem as scary as [REC]. The zombie attacks aren't as sudden and surprising this time around, the lengths to which the government will go to cover things up isn’t as startlingly revealed here as in the original, and all the running up and down the stairs that worked in [REC], almost seems to border on British farce territory here.

If you’re a monolingual English speaker for whom subtitles will destroy any suspense, then by all means, see Quarantine. For everybody else – see [REC].