I haven't watched any American horror movies in a very long time. They're geared only for the juvenile teeny-boppers, and full of pointless hacking/slashing, which is unappealing to me, even back in the day. (Never got into the Friday 13th/Halloween crap.) But recently I caught a couple minutes of Quarantine playing on TV, and it seemed intriguing. I also like the lead, Jennifer Carpenter. Cute. Not the usual idiotic fare. So I DVRd it when it reran. Hubby decided to watch with me, very surprising, since he usually avoids this genre.
So the story is about a reporter and her cameraman doing a puff piece on firefighters, and in the course of responding to a call-out, ends up quarantined in an apartment building with a mysterious illness spreading among its residents. We both really enjoyed it! It was well-done, tense and suspenseful, and all the zombies running around weren't over the top corny. Good outline of a plot, just enough to not be stupid, very interesting premise. I really liked the live-action documentary feeling of the hand-held camera, which brought an immediacy and intensity to the action.
I found out that it was a remake of a Spanish movie, REC, and that was being offered OnDemand, so watched that too. It was very good, much better than the American version. But don't get me wrong, the Am version does a very good job this time matching the original. Don't quote me, but I *think* the same director/producer made both, and shot for shot matched up, so that would explain why it retained most of its goodness. Yeah, yeah, ripoffs of other movies abound - Jody Foster groping around blindly awash in green night-vision, for instance. Blair Witch-y, etc. But it's all done well.
Overall, I was very pleased to see that the horror genre hasn't gone completely off the rails. We were both very entertained without feeling like it was a pointless hack-fest.
