Quarantine and [REC]

In the spirit of Halloween I have decided to compare two "scary" movies.  Something I had not known before a couple of nights ago, was that the movie Quarantine was a remake of a Spanish film titled [REC].  With their release dates being roughly a year apart, I figured that the movies would be fairly similar, and I was indeed correct.

Considering that the movies were from two different countries, both versions were based in their respective countries.  Their overall story line was very much the same, except that [REC] was filmed with the Barcelona Fire Department, and the American version was with the Los Angeles Fire Department.  The difference in countries is almost the only difference I saw in the two movies.  I am of course more in favor of the American version, despite it being a copy of the Spanish version, mostly because I didn't have to read subtitles and get a headache from the constant chaos of people yelling in a different language.

Most American films can tend to be filled with blood and gore, so I was actually quite curious to see if the Spanish were just as bad with their films.  After watching [REC], I think the Spanish do add some nasty cosmetics, but I was not quite as disgusted as I was watching Quarantine.  Quarantine had a scene showing  a leg snapped in half with a bone showing, as well as another mans head being drilled into, where as [REC] had some very detailed bite marks.  I found the two movies to be quite similar in blood and gore, and that was something I expected to remain similar.

The story of Quarantine followed [REC] almost spot on.  There were small differences in the beginning at the Fire Houses, the one I noticed the most was the lack of "I bet you I can bang her by the end of the night," as said by one of the Firemen talking about the reporter, which was shown in Quarantine, but not [REC].  Other than that, the characters were all pretty much the same, and all of the events had only minor differences that really don't have much of change in the story or film in general.

In the first scene I knew that the two movies would be very much the same, and it stayed the same throughout both films as well.  I thought that maybe the whole zombie thing would be mostly an American story, and boy was I wrong.  For the most part, it seems that foreign made films tend to stick with the same types of stories, just located in their own countries.  I honestly didn't see any other differences between the two movies other than each being filmed in its own country.  These may have been bad movies to compare, being that the American version is just a buffed up copy of the Spanish, but I enjoyed watching them both.  It has shown me that Spanish audiences are very much similar to Americans, and that we both have an interest in similar types of films.