Quarantine

I was looking forward to this movie ever since I saw the first commercial for it. Anything that is dark, grainy and has a greenish hue is my kind of deal.

The Ambience
If you don't like the feeling that you are perpetually about to be murdered, then this is probably not the movie for you. It is constantly dark (it takes place in an old Los Angeles apartment building which (surprise!) loses power often). There is a constant worry that something is going to appear from the darkness and scare a little bit of poo out of you.

The Cast
I only recognized a couple people, Greg Germann (Ally McBeal) who plays a veterinarian trapped in the building and one other guy whose name escapes me. He plays a fireman who hits on the female lead. Speaking of which, Jennifer Carpenter is all kinds of hot. It verges on distracting because you just want to have a genital-to-genital business meeting with her. Or at least I did. The mix of characters makes you truly suspect everyone of everything that is going on. Whether it be the non-English speaking voodoo-looking people or the little girl who is suspiciously under the weather, everyone is a suspect.

What it reminds me of
Think 'Cloverfield' meets '28 Days Later'. It is another movie, a la 'Cloverfield' and 'The Blair Witch Project' that takes on the self-shot motif and puts the cameraman (i.e. you) right in the thick of the horror. Add in a rapacious virus of some sort with fast-moving zombie-like creatures and you have a '28 Days Later' situation. Also like 'Cloverfield' (which was roughly 1 hour, 13 minutes long), 'Quarantine' runs a super-short 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Effectiveness
This movie's aim is to scare the ever-loving shit out of you, but in a more direct sense than a typical slasher film. The film is extremely claustrophobic as it taken place entirely inside a three-story apartment building that appears to have been built in the early 1900s. It puts you in the middle of everything and you feel like you are living the nightmare with these characters. The relative brevity of the movie is misleading as it feels much longer. Not in a soul-crushing 'Knocked Up' sort of way where you just want it to end, but in a 'I'm living this and it is scaring the piss out of me' way.

Scoring System
My scoring system will be out of 100, because there are only so many movies that can get 3 stars when some of those movies are far better than others.

0-20 = Don't Waste Your Time
21-40 = Only Watch If You Watched (and enjoyed) 'Good Burger'
41-60 = Could Be Enjoyable If Viewed With Friends
61-80 = Ranging From Above Average to Very Good
81-90 = Movies That I Would Consider Buying For Future Viewing
91-100 = 'Braveheart,' 'Lord of the Rings,' 'American Beauty' Range of Perfection

'Quarantine' Score
72 - That might sound like I thought it was mediocre, but that is not the case. It is definitely worth a watch and it achieves exactly what it sets out to achieve. It was better than I expected, as I thought that it was going to be nothing more than a decent fright flick. It was that and plenty more. To get upwards of 80 a movie has to be life-alteringly awesome. I recommend this movie to everyone who loves a good scare in a dimly-lit building with fucked-up circumstances abound.