One of my original plans for the October Horror Movie Challenge was to do an entire month of found footage movies - 31 days of nothing but shakycam, night vision and the possibility of maps being kicked into creeks. Thankfully for the sake of my sanity I eventually decided against it (if for no other reason than it would likely burn even me out on the genre, and I have the Asylum's rip-offs of the Paranormal Activity films, for Eris' sake), but even so I kept a few of them in my final plan - mainly ones I already and and/or I particularly liked. One of those films is today's review, the Spanish-language film [rec].
Angela Videl is a TV reporter doing an on-location episode of a series that follows various night-shift workers to show what their jobs are like. For this episode she and her cameraman have been assigned to a fire station, where they will be shadowing a pair of firemen. They get called out to what seems like a routine call - an old woman is apparently trapped in her apartment and may have hurt herself. When they get there, however, it quickly becomes clear that things are more serious than that as the woman attacks her would-be rescuers, biting a police officer and severely injuring him. They try to get the injured officer to safety but discover that the apartment building has been sealed off and no-one is allowed in or out. As the situation deteriorates further, Angela orders her cameraman to keep filming, to make sure that the story of what happens that night gets out one way or the other - but first they'll have to make sure they survive the night, as whatever was affecting the old woman has started to spread...
There's a scene about 20 minutes or so into [rec] that made me realise that this was going to be a good film. I don't want to spoil it because it's just such a good - and shocking - moment, but I will say that it bears some similarities to the infamous "cut-away dinner scene" from Alien, as none of the actors save one obvious one knew that it was going to happen, making their reactions to it completely genuine. From that point on though, the movie's adrenaline meter is set to 11 and doesn't let up, although it had already started to move up before that, when they first encountered the elderly woman who is quite obviously not well - any audience member who knows how these things go will be instantly suspecting what's up with her, so there's tension as the scene unfolds and we wait for what we know is going to happen.
Whether or not the people infected in [rec] are zombies is an interesting question. Technically, they seem to be suffering from a form of rapid-onset rabies which would put them in the 28 Days Later category of zombies, but as things progress we see that some of them get up after suffering apparently fatal wounds, so any pedants in the audience might find it difficult to classify them. There's also the issue of the film's climax, which seems to suggest a religious cause for all of this (even more so in the sequel, [rec] 2, which just served to make things even more confusing, but that's a different film), and I think that the sudden information dump we get at the film's climax is in fact the weakest part of the film. We don't need to know what's caused this infection, and we certainly don't need a sudden bout of exposition that takes us in a totally new direction just moments after the survivors have run screaming into the last safe place in the building, chased by a half-dozen or so screeching zombies who want to eat at the TV reporter buffet. And even then it doesn't manage to explain everything...
When it comes to the curse of shakycam too, [rec] is a particularly terrible offender, as the whole movie is shot from the perspective of only one camera, and once the shit hits the fan the cameraman is running just about everywhere, and often up and down flights of stairs. Personally, I'm impressed by his cardio. On the other hand, the film does at least answer the other issue that plagues most found-footage films, the "Why are you still filming during all of this?" question. In this case, they're reporters and they want to get this story out one way or the other, and so it makes sense that they'd continue to film despite everything. There's also one beautiful shot where the camera looks down the stairwell from the top floor, and sees several zombies scattered throughout the lower floors, all looking up and snarling at the same time. It's a marvellous moment of mise en scene.
[rec] gave a tremendous jolt of energy to the found-footage genre, which was starting to slow down as the original ideas started drying up, when it came out. It clearly had an effect on the English-speaking movie industry, as they promptly started work on the American remake without even giving the original a general release (it finally got one when the remake, Quarantine, was also released). It's definitely a film that deserves to be seen, either alongside its remake or on its own, though, and is most definitely one of my favourites of the genre.
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