Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/13.

"Quarantine delivers the heebie-jeebies with solid acting and perfectly calibrated shocks," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Cleverly working his claustrophobic setting (and the adapted script from the Spanish movie [REC]), [John Erick] Dowdle keeps the action tight and the injuries nasty."

More from John Rogers: "It's been a damn long time since I've been in a packed theater where people screamed their asses off and cheered/fist-pumped/went NUTS when the survivors fought back."

Joe Leydon finds it "a modestly inventive and sporadically exciting horror flick predicated on the idea that whiplash pans, inconstant focusing and other faux cinéma vérité embellishments can refresh even the moldiest of zombie-movie tropes."

"Dowdle manages a few nice shocks and some neat moments of pitch-black gallows humor, but Quarantine nevertheless feels awfully familiar, and it grows less convincing with each passing moment," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "At its worst, it abandons realism entirely and flirts with gory kitsch."

"Neither [REC] nor Quarantine have any goal in mind beyond scaring the audience senseless," writes Paul Matwychuk. "[T]he monsters aren't metaphors for any unconscious terrors, there are no political points being made about governments depriving citizens of their civil rights. These two movies are scare machines, pure and simple. But there's a place at the multiplex for a well-constructed scare machine, and [REC] (and, to a lesser extent, Quarantine) got the audiences I was with worked up into a state of giddy, babbling excitement the likes of which I haven't seen in a long time."

"There is an expression in French for anything that doesn't live up to it's hype," writes Simon Laperriere at Twitch. "We call it a pétard mouillé, which translates as a wet firework. This is exactly what Pascal Laugier's Martyrs is."

Online viewing tip. Tim Lucas: "This link will take you to a YouTube audience video of Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni performing 'Suspiria' onstage in Toronto with ex-Goblin keyboardist Maurizio Guarini's band Orco Muto, in 2007."

Online viewing tips. Matt Bradshaw rounds up lots of scary trailers at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at October 13, 2008 6:21 AM