I was a little wary going into [REC]. Having heard about the 2007 film for a few years now, I was aware it was yet another of those BLAIR WITCH inspired handy-cam flicks where we're supposed to be scared by how real and immediate everything seems. Still, I was pleasantly surprised that [REC] is one of the better examples of the genre I've seen.[REC] opens as raw footage for a late night show in which a cute host (Manuela Velasco) interacts with different people who are up working while most citizens are sleeping. This episode happens to be about firemen and gets off to a slow start before an engine is finally called to respond to an apartment building where a woman is trapped in her apartment. Unfortunately for everyone, the woman turns out to be a blood thirsty zombie, and before the building residents, the two person TV crew or the firemen know what's happening, they're being quarantined in the building.
For the rest of the film the quarantined people argue, run up and down the stairs several times, become infected, kill each other, and attempt to escape, all shot from the point of view of the camera man (Pablo Rosso) in a fairly realistic manner. There are very few cheats in the film to interrupt this point of view, though when they do pop up they're a little more glaring than they probably should be, most notably in a sequence in which the camera is rewound and a key scene is replayed for us. This suggests within the fictional world of the movie some editor touched the footage after it was shot and discovered, and if that's the case, how come a bunch of other stuff wasn't edited out? There's another sequence in which man in being interviewed and his audio is spoken over a montage of shots of injured residents, which could have only been done by an editor after the fact, which again, makes you wonder, if that's the case, why not cut out the endless runs up and down the stairs and the multiple gaffes committed by the TV host early on?
But, I'm being a little too nerdy and nitpicky here. That stuff hardly matters. Let's concentrate on the main strength of the: it does not suffer from the one thing that plagues most of these films the most which is the complete unwillingness to actually show any monsters or suitably supernatural events to the viewer. I'm not saying all movies have to be graphic and I realize there is something to be said for holding back the monsters for suspense's sake. However, too many of these "amateur" pseudo-documentary horror flicks use their own premise seemingly as an excuse not to deliver the goods. Too many of them suffer from thinking their premise is good enough. Not [REC] -- this one promises zombies, and you get zombies and more, including a particularly frightening creature who emerges from the shadows during the film's freaky climax, easily the best part of the movie.
Ironically, the pseudo-documentary style of the film ends up making it seem a little longer than it actually is. It's not quite 80 minutes but seems to move a little slower than you'd think an 80 minute zombie outbreak movie would, and I guess that's mostly due to repetition. In some ways, while being one of the best examples of its genre, the movie is also a victim of its own set up -- a slave to a camera man who must run from one place to another in seemingly real time, tied down to a script consisting mostly of panicked people shouting the same things to each other over and over again. This is probably a little easier to put up with if you speak Spanish (oh yeah, this movie is from Spain) but it gets a little old when you're reading subtitles super imposed on top of shots that never stop moving.
The actual story almost eclipses the wow factor of wondering how they pulled this off, but not quite. Probably the best audience for this film is a group who can appreciate watching the filmmakers pull off all their tricks while also looking for a good scare. If you're just in it for the scare, you may not make it all the way through the set up to the payoff. But, if you do, it's totally worth it.
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