No horror film has gotten under audiences’ skin recently more then the Spanish film [REC] which has been taking the film festival circuit apart (pun intended) for over the last year. American studios quickly jumped on the ship with the quickie remake QUARANTINE (itself a pretty damn good film), but [REC] has a raw and unforgiving atmosphere with unknown actors (at least to American shores) that bring the scares home unlike the remake which had a cast of young & up coming actors.
If you’ve seen the American remake QUARANTINE then you already know 95% of the story as the remake played it true to the original. {REC] finds reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman Pablo (Pablo Rosso) at a Barcelona firehouse covering the events that happen at a firehouse during the graveyard shift when all normal people are sleeping. In fact, the show that they are filming is called “While You Sleep.” Thinking that the night will be a bust since typically nothing really happens at a fire station at night, Angela and Pablo soon find themselves tagging along with the firemen during what should be a routine call in which an apartment complex has reported noises coming from one of the tenants’ homes.
When they arrive, police are already on the scene and are about to go in all the while Angela keeps films hoping to get something exciting for her show. Once they step into the apartment they encounter an old woman who appears to be senile and unresponsive but when she attacks one of the police officers the firemen are forced to defend themselves and all hell breaks loose. They try to get the wounded police officer out of the building but soon realize that they and all the other tenants of the building have been locked up in the building by order of the CDC and the police. It appears that they have been exposed to some type of infectious disease that spreads quickly turning people into, for lack of a better word “zombies” whose only goal is to kill. Now Angela and the uninfected tenants must band together in order to find a way out of the building before it is too late.
Filmed entirely from the POV of Pablo’s camera the film is relentless and fast paced from beginning to end and it puts you right into the action and danger of the film. Similar to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and more recently CLOVERFIELD and DIARY OF THE DEAD, [REC] is a testament that good horror films only need to put the audience in the same shoes as the characters in the film to be effective. Having seen QUARANTINE before this film you’d think that I would have already been prepared for what was going to happen, but [REC] is more effective and still more terrifying simply because I was unfamiliar with any of actors in the film. One of the highlights of last year (that now only has to get an official release here in the states).
If you’ve seen the American remake QUARANTINE then you already know 95% of the story as the remake played it true to the original. {REC] finds reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman Pablo (Pablo Rosso) at a Barcelona firehouse covering the events that happen at a firehouse during the graveyard shift when all normal people are sleeping. In fact, the show that they are filming is called “While You Sleep.” Thinking that the night will be a bust since typically nothing really happens at a fire station at night, Angela and Pablo soon find themselves tagging along with the firemen during what should be a routine call in which an apartment complex has reported noises coming from one of the tenants’ homes.
When they arrive, police are already on the scene and are about to go in all the while Angela keeps films hoping to get something exciting for her show. Once they step into the apartment they encounter an old woman who appears to be senile and unresponsive but when she attacks one of the police officers the firemen are forced to defend themselves and all hell breaks loose. They try to get the wounded police officer out of the building but soon realize that they and all the other tenants of the building have been locked up in the building by order of the CDC and the police. It appears that they have been exposed to some type of infectious disease that spreads quickly turning people into, for lack of a better word “zombies” whose only goal is to kill. Now Angela and the uninfected tenants must band together in order to find a way out of the building before it is too late.
Filmed entirely from the POV of Pablo’s camera the film is relentless and fast paced from beginning to end and it puts you right into the action and danger of the film. Similar to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and more recently CLOVERFIELD and DIARY OF THE DEAD, [REC] is a testament that good horror films only need to put the audience in the same shoes as the characters in the film to be effective. Having seen QUARANTINE before this film you’d think that I would have already been prepared for what was going to happen, but [REC] is more effective and still more terrifying simply because I was unfamiliar with any of actors in the film. One of the highlights of last year (that now only has to get an official release here in the states).
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