"The Quarantining of Emily Rose" ... doesn't suck!

You may have heard that this weekend an honest-to-Blob horror movie opened in the theatres: Quarantine, the remake of Spanish hit REC. I haven't seen the original since I can't track down a bootleg that is actually subtitled and the only thing I can actually say in Spanish is "I think about cream cheese every day". (Which is true, btw.)

Anyway, I'm a fan of a good parlor trick (Quarantine employs the Cannibal Holocaust "found footage" trick that Cloverfield recently used to intense effect) and I also kinda dig Jennifer Carpenter from her rather piggish performance on Dexter (which is a compliment, believe it or not), so I thought I'd check it out.

And it ain't half bad! A few good scares, a simple but very clever trapped-with-the-infected setup (it's like Mulberry Drive with a budget) and an honest-to-God batshit breakdown by our Final Girl make for a solid 88 minutes of diverting horror moviegoing. There are some who will likely balk at Carpenter's character's unraveling in the third act (like the guys in my audience yelling at her to "Shut the fuck up!"), but I kind of loved that our tour guide through all the madness is utterly ill-equipped to handle any of the grislier developments of the night and basically throws in the towel.


And plus we get to see Carpenter retap into the role that put her on the map, that of a beleaguered teenage ghost motel in the otherwise completely unwatchable The Exorcism of Emily Rose. On the one hand I feel bad that her cutiepants boyfriend Michael C. Hall had to clean up her mess every night when she came home, but for the most part it was fun to see her shit her pants for about 30 minutes.

Anyone else catch it? What'dya think?