Quarantine

An American remake of the Spanish horror movie ‘[Rec]’ that adopts the same basic recipe, but removes any hint of flavour or texture, reducing cutting-edge Catalan cuisine to bland, bite-sized McNuggets. Director John Erick Dowdle and his brother/co-writer Drew cut their teeth on ‘The Poughkeepsie Tapes’, a ‘Blair Witch’-style mock-documentary based on the ‘found’ video recordings of a serial killer. Yet their calamitous take on the real-time shaky-cam terror of ‘ [Rec]’ – filmed on studio sets rather than a real apartment block – feels false and flat.

The hyperventilating Jennifer Carpenter, so credible in ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’, is hopelessly miscast as rookie TV reporter Angela Vidal, who joins a fire-fighting team on a routine call-out, then finds herself trapped inside a quarantined building with her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) and some very frightened residents. A distressed old lady bites one of the fire-fighters, all hell breaks loose, and suddenly the place is sealed off by troops in contamination suits. ‘Quarantine’ then replaces the relentless nerve-shredding terror of ‘[Rec]’ with headless-chicken hysteria.