Quarantine

(2008) ****

JPX reviewed this one last week, so I'll make the synopsis brief: A reporter following firefighters follows them on a call to an apartment building where an older woman is having some kind of medical issues. She bites one of the fireman, they all get "quarantined" inside of the building, and it all goes downhill from there.

This one is definitely worth seeing in the theater. It deserves the five star rating, because it actually does what most of the horror movies here tend not to do... Scare you. My wife spent most of the last 15 minutes of the film with her hands over her eyes, asking me what was going on, but unable to actually look. I love that kind of reaction! The infected are of the "28 days later" variety - angry, fast, and vicious. They keep the tension up and provide lots of good scares. I didn't go for the full five stars, because the plot and background story are fairly weak. Also, I think this film may have been better if it wasn't done in the 1st person camera lens style. There was one extremely original portion where the cameraman kills one of the creatures with the camera he is filming with. That alone is worth the price of admission, but otherwise, not too terribly affective.

On a side note, as JPX mentioned, this film was based on a Spanish movie, Rec, which I was fortunate enough to see in Tijuana this past summer (my car was being fixed, I had to kill 6 hours). So if and when they finally release Rec on video, it is just as good if not better than Quarantine.