31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 17: [REC]

2007.

We’ve hit another milestone. It is 2007, I’m now sixteen-years-old. That means this is the year I’ll go see a movie called Transformers directed by Michael Bay. It was a movie I hated so much that I had to write a rant about it in my high school’s paper. It was my first ever movie review. That is where this all began.

I originally saw [REC], directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, the way I imagine most of you saw it, as a movie called Quarantine from 2008, directed by John Erick Dowdle. They are both found-footage zombie horror movies, just the original is in Spanish and the remake is in English. Which one do you bet turns out to be totally redundant?

Quarantine’s existence made [REC] very hard to find in the US, as the distributor, Sony Pictures did not want their movie to compete with itself. [REC] never had a theatrical release in my country, coming to straight to DVD in 2009, and by then there was already a [REC] 2. This is around the time that I was online enough to read reviews of [REC] from disappointed fans who were upset it had been mangled into Quarantine. They all thought [REC] was this really special movie made worse by an English translation. So, were they right? Was the Spanish version better?

Well, first of all, Quarantine sucks. I did not like it in 2008, I don’t like it now. It is worse in about every way versus the original. I mean no offense to its star, Jennifer Carpenter, who is decent enough in a mediocre and unnecessary movie. But even if [REC] is better, is it a great movie? I’m not sure.

[REC]’s star is instead Manuela Velasco, playing Ángela Vidal, a host of a late-night show called Mientras Usted Duerme (“While You’re Sleeping”). It’s a kind of cheap local TV filler program that does on-the-site reporting of various late-night things. In this case Ángela is visiting a fire station when they get a midnight call to an apartment building where some medical emergency has occurred. Ángela and her cameraman, Pablo (Pablo Rosso) ride along. Then everybody discovers the medical emergency is a zombie outbreak. Worse, or arguably better for the rest of the world, the government authorities have locked up the building down behind them. Trapped between an undead rock and a hard place, our heroes struggle to survive the night.

Here is where I drop my hot take: I don’t like found footage movies. I never have. More than twenty years after The Blair Witch Project, this method of filmmaking still feels mostly like a gimmick to me. I cannot name too many movies that are much improved by this style. I did not much like Quarantine, and therefore, largely do not much love [REC]. (Which by the way is named after the button that you hit to record on cameras, back in the day people used cameras and not just their phones.) I’m glad at least that [REC] has no gimmicky pretensions of being “real”, but it still is not improved by a total commitment to a single POV.

Manuela Velasco is a great lead with a winning smile. I almost wish we could have seen the entire Mientras Usted Duerme episode. She is really charming in her attempts to make a boring show work. Once the outbreak happens, Ángela gets a bit lost in the scuffle. She's mostly is here to scream at the ghouls. Pablo is behind the camera the entire time, you only see his back once. The rest of cast is just not that interesting. One older gentleman is hamming it up for the camera. There's some racism happening in the apartment building against a Japanese family. One little girl turns into a little undead imp, that's fun. Her mom turns too and is handcuffed to the stairs and tries to bit at Ángela. However, I just don't think there's enough character here to fill eighty minutes. This is a short movie that feels very long somehow.

[REC] is more subdued and less frenetic than Quarantine. The American version has the Pablo-equivalent beat a zombie to death with his camera’s lens, which was a stupid scene. It would definitely destroy the camera. Nothing that preposterous happens here. But [REC] also takes extremely long to get to the point where you could get mileage out of the found-footage technique: that being long-takes. Most of the movie is spent on the bottom floors with characters talking/ It isn’t until the last half hour that we have a nice long sequence of the heroes fighting off the hordes of revenants. What you want is intense visceral claustrophobia of the zombies coming right at you. We just don't have a lot of it in [REC]. 

And Pablo, will you put the fucking camera down? You’re being no help, dude.

There’s a last-minute twist that the zombies are not biological but some kind of demonic deal. This is less clever than the movie thinks. They're the dead walking, who really cares why? The heroes have no hope either way. Maybe that matters more in the greater franchise. [REC] has three sequels, and I cannot say I'm dying to watch any of them. If you’re more into found-footage stuff, probably check that out. Ultimately, [REC] feels like a solid twenty-minute V/H/S short dragged out to eighty minutes. Not for me.

Next time we travel to 2008, the year of Heath Ledger's Jokerfication, the global economy disintegrating because Wall Street motherfuckers got too greedy to check their math, and our next movie, Let the Right One In.