I love Jennifer Carpenter.  And no, not in that weird, sick fanboy way–I suppose a better way to put it is I love Jennifer Carpenter’s work.  Ever since she blew my mind wide open with her performance in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, I’ve been downright amazed by this woman’s sheer capacity for horror film.

Her performance in recent release Quarantine, coming out on DVD on the order of Real Soon Now, is no exception, and it literally made the movie for me. But enough raving about Jennifer Carpenter: let’s get into the plot.

Jennifer Carpenter plays a local TV journalist out with her cameraman for an evening with the local fire department, because you know there’s always a good human interest story in what firemen do while waiting for something horrible to happen.  That and if you can be around for the something horrible, well, bonus points to you.  The something horrible in question comes up when a 911 call sends the fire department to a small apartment building where police are already on the scene, answering a call about screaming coming from an apartment.  It doesn’t take long to discover that something seriously wrong is going on in the apartment, and you won’t believe who actually MAKES the discovery of just what it is they’re dealing with.

Worse yet, the government seems to be involved in all this, and they’ve cut off the phone lines. And the cable.  And the internet, and even the cell phone service.  As the denizens of the building try desperately to piece together what’s going on outside their very door (thanks to an old TV with rabbit ears), the situation inside their very door goes from bad to eeeyipes-grade worse on the order of real fast.

And when the dust finally settles…all that’s left to tell everyone else what happened inside that building is the news footage shot by Jennifer Carpenter’s intrepid cameraman.

This movie gave me a newfound respect for the Spanish that I had not thought possible.  See, I knew Europe was making some inroads into the horror market. what with all the Scandinavian horror that’d been coming out lately, and the French bound and determined to take over the “almost a snuff film” substrata of horror, and the Germans had always had at least a toe or two in the water, I knew Europe was a player.  Not as big as the Japanese and the good ole U.S. of A, of course, but still, a player.

Quarantine, you see, is based on a Spanish horror title called “[REC]“, probably so named for the record feature on a camera.  And if Quarantine is the end result of American horror mastery applied to the base that is [REC], well, then I’ve got nothing but respect for the Spanish.  Quarantine was easily one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in some time.  A masterful blend of suspense and shock, it shows just how good a jump scene can be when it’s added to some prior tension building.  I consider Quarantine to be an absolute masterwork of horror because it succeeds so unabashedly well.  That, and consider for a minute just how POSSIBLE Quarantine is–some kind of biological contaminant gets into one of your neighbors and turns an apartment building into a charnel house?  Man, that’s why I live in the middle of nowhere.

This will easily be one of the scariest movies you can get your hands on.  Take this with all seriousness–I’ve seen thousands of these, so I don’t make those pronouncements lightly.  Something is almost certain to scare you about this movie, and if you don’t enjoy the ride, then I really feel bad for you.