REC. (2007) DIRECTED BY JAUME
BALAGUERO AND PACO PLAZA. CINEMATOGRAPHY BY PABLO ROSSO. STARRING
MANUELA VELASCO AND PABLO ROSSO.
QUARANTINE. (2008) BASED ON THE
MOVIE 'REC' BY JAUME BALAGUERO AND PACO PLAZA. DIRECTED BY JOHN ERICK
DOWDLE. CINEMATOGRAPHY BY KEN SENG.
STARRING JENNIFER CARPENTER, STEVE
HARRIS AND JAY HERNANDEZ.
I've been watching rather a lot of these
'found-footage-filmed-in-night-vision' horror movies lately, to the
point where if I accidentally caught a glimpse of something filmed in
regular daytime vision on a camera that wasn't shaking all over the
place like a flippin' Riverdancer, I'd probably be all like: 'Whoa
man, wtf...?,' haha.
Still,
it's all in a good cause, which is to further my horror education so
that I can write knowledgeably about scary stuff for you guys, my
loyal reader. Did I say 'reader,' singular?
It seems I did. Of course, I meant 'readers,' plural.
Obviously, I have more than one.
I forgot that
there's that other guy from Cork as well, the one who reads my
reviews to take his mind off his ringworm and the fact that his wife
is having it away with Harry the temporary postman, the guy who
stepped up when the regular guy got his foot caught in a manhole. I
wonder how he's doing, the poor guy? There was talk of him losing
that foot for a while, you know.
Anyway,
as you horror movie smarties probably know already, QUARANTINE
is the remake of REC,
the hugely popular Spanish
horror film from 2007. Critics were falling over themselves in an
attempt to say good things about REC, but
to be honest I found the almost scene-for-scene remake, QUARANTINE,
to be pretty much as good as the brilliant original.
The plot is
almost identical for both films, so we'll look at it from a 'joint'
point of view rather than be nit-picky and go through both plots
separately. Both films are based in identical-looking apartment
blocks, really nice apartments with loads of nice spacious rooms, the
kind you wouldn't mind living in yourself if there wasn't a load of
horrible crazy stuff going on in them.
In both
films, a beautiful and vivacious young TV presenter called Angela
Vidal is 'shadowing' the
local Fire Department with her trusty cameraman for the night, in an
attempt to show the viewers what these brave strapping lads get up to
while the general public is sound asleep in their beds. Jake in the remake is particularly sexy and gorgeous. He can access my 'pole hole' anytime, snigger.
An
over-excited Angela, probably thrilled skinny at being perved on by the handsome
firemen, is just dying for
a major incident to occur during the night-shift to boost the show's
ratings. Boy, does she
ever get her wish...!
After multiple jokes about 'firemens'
hoses' and the infamous 'pole
hole,' the lads are called out
to an apartment building where an old lady has been heard screaming blue murder from inside her flat.
No-one, not
one of the characters in either film, could have imagined the horror
that awaits them when they reach their destination. The old lady,
when they eventually break down her locked door, is covered in blood
and foaming at the mouth. Some of the other residents don't look so
hot either...
What
exactly is going on in this building? Well, I can't tell you that as
such but I can tell
you that when a bunch of big-shot government types known as the CDC
(I can't tell you what that stands for, it's a spoiler!)
seal off the entire building
because of the threat of something called a BNC (again,
spoiler!), the sh*t really hits
the fan.
Normal
healthy people are effectively locked into the building with a load of sick and
extremely dangerous, practically rabid people,
heh-heh-heh. I just sneaked a spoiler into that sentence there
and
you didn't even notice, tee-hee.
Can the
normals find a way to save themselves before the cannibalistic
mutants tear them to shreds, and will Angela's footage make her the
television presenting star she's no doubt always wanted to be, or
will the TV station end up writing her obituary? The answer, my
friend, is blowing in the wind...
The
shaky-cam is very shaky indeed here, so much so that you've got to be
quick to keep up. There are high levels of gore and bloody disgusting-ness
in both films, but probably a little more so in the remake. REC
in particular was praised for
the claustrophobic nature of its camera-work that helps to ramp up
the fear and tension a million percent as the movie progresses.
I love
the interaction of the neighbours in both films, especially in
QUARANTINE. They all
do a great job of showing the right level of panic and terror for
such a gruesome situation. Both the Angelas are also brilliant at showing mounting terror. Though many of the scenes are
vomit-inducingly horrible, I feel particularly sorry for the man
trapped in the lift with the deranged dog. His fate is just awful.
That
whole thing of being sealed up somewhere by orders of the 'gummint'
so that the infection or
whatever it is you've got doesn't spread to the general population
taps into a very real fear that people have. It happened in that
brilliant horror movie RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR and
they did it in THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)
as well, with the dome sealing in the town and everything inside it because
Springfield was so polluted thanks to Homer Simpson and his silo of
pig-poop. (Spider-pig...!)
Let's
face it, folks, if the 'gummint' thinks
that you're a risk to national health and safety and/or security, you are going
down. All the way
down. Imagine if the
last thing you were ever destined to see was one of those faceless
guys in those white protective hazard-suit things walling you up
inside your home. Imagine if the last voice you ever heard was a
disembodied one talking into a megaphone ordering you as follows:
'Do not attempt to leave your home. I
repeat, do NOT attempt to leave your home. If you attempt to leave
your home, you will be terminated. Do not attempt to leave your
home...'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA
HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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