[DVD Review (R2)] [• REC]
Put the just announced rush-job sequel (that could well take this glorious film down the route of the Saw movies, god help us) out of your mind. Avoid the US remake, Quarantined, with its trailer that spoils BOTH versions of the movie experience, until you’ve seen this. And just embrace a genuinely brilliant horror experience. You love ‘horror’? You love being scared? You have GOT to experience this movie!
[• REC] is a film I want you to know as little as possible about going in so trust me to obliterate any mention of plot from this review. It’s also a film I’m going to find it very difficult to speak of without you thinking I’m just writing “hyperbole” and making poster-quote savvy “grand statements”. So let me preface this review with the following declaration: Believe every word I tell you. Take this review as gospel. I’m going to tell you exactly what [• REC] meant to me, as unbelievable as it may seem.
It always amazed me, post-Blair Witch Project, there wasn’t more rip-offs of this whole ‘camcorder-the-consequences’ concept then what there were. I wasn’t a strong fan of The Blair Witch Project but I admired its success and it was because of this resulting triumph that I was staggered by just how few inferior knock-offs arrived in the film’s wake (not that I would have particularly welcomed them). Hell, one good comic-book movie has seen the market flooded. And just look at how many god-awful Saw inspired nonsense we’ve had to suffer through. Talk about a ‘delayed reaction’ though because nearly ten years have passed and now we’re starting to see “Blair Witch with a giant monster” (Cloverfield), “Blair Witch with zombies” (Diary of the Dead) and, now with [• REC], a Spanish spin on “Blair Witch meets 28 Days Later”.
[• REC] owes a lot to The Blair Witch Project and 28 Days Later. Not only that but nods in the direction of George A. Romero (obviously) and Neil Marshal’s The Descent are commonplace too. The thing is every single film it cribs from is one that has pulled itself short in the scare department; scary but not truly terrifying. [• REC] is the proverbial “student” that has become the “master”. It may not be an original concept but it does a hell of a lot of brave and unique things with such an unoriginal model.
Quite frankly, for me personally, it was the most terrifying film I have ever seen. The film is lean both in its running time (it’s just over an hour in length) and in terms of what characterisation it has to offer but in terms of the all important scares it is nothing short of astounding. Following a deliberately stale and leisurely paced establishing act, [• REC] kicks into gear and does not let up. The “filming within a film” notion works less as a gimmick then you’d imagine, even when the film does break from it’s pace to rewind on itself for a brief moment it doesn’t annoy or come across as pretentious.
Every single frame counts for something. The use of sound and shadow is staggeringly effective and I just cannot find the words to describe just what a pleasurably horrific experience [• REC] was to me and my date. Many a horror film these days has its gory sequences set up like ‘cum shots’ in a porno. Many of the genre have nothing but such sequences, without any sense of context or story etc. Even more horror flicks of the modern age have their scares present and correct as you’ve seen from the trailer but little to nothing else on show. [• REC] is a film that starts scary from the end of it’s first act, gets scarier, slowly becomes terrifying, builds into a sense of relentlessness and just keeps spinning and spinning upon itself until the final ten minutes turn into something I can only describe as utterly nerve-shredding.
The ‘camcorder-the-consequences’ concept certainly isn’t a new one. We’re all aware of that. But it is most certainly the best interpretation of the concept I’ve seen and the best horror experience I’ve seen in a long time. Every ‘new wave’ within the horror genre has left me wanting; the BBFC re-releases (The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre etc) of the mid-90s, despite being undisputable classics, left me thinking “After all the hype, is that it?”, the post-modern spike of movies like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer etc. in the late 90s were more fun comedies then horror encounters, the influx of Japanese horrors and their subsequent US remakes bored me to tears and the less said about the tsunami of “gore-nography” the better. [• REC] just astounded me in a way that I’ve not encountered within the world of horror since I first experienced John Carpenter’s Halloween back in 1990.
Drop everything, queue for as long as it takes to takes to get ahold of a copy of this and make sure you’ve got company and a well-lit room to return to afterwards… just make sure that you experience [• REC].
Related Posts:
- *UK EXCLUSIVE* [Movie Review] [• REC]
- [DVD Review (R2)] WIND CHILL
- THE INDISPENSIBLES - #15: HALLOWEEN
- [DVD REVIEW (R1)] P2
- [Movie Review] 30 DAYS OF NIGHT
No comments yet - be the first to tell us what you think!
What's Your Opinion?