61
Summary: Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman Pablo plan to spend a night shadowing firemen as part of a documentary television series called While You Were Sleeping. After answering an assistance call, Angela and Pablo find themselves trapped inside an apartment building that the CDC has quarantined. An American remake of REC was released in 2008 under the title Quarantine.
WHAT’S HOT: I’ve been trying to cut back on the excessive amount of categories on this site. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve formatted the main page of my site so that it’s easy to search for movies by country, year of release, and by popular horror movie types. Recently I’ve been torn between the Zombie and Infection categories, because they’re infuriatingly similar. Suffice to say that every Zombie movie is an Infection movie, but not every Infection movie is a Zombie movie! REC is one of the many movies that falls somewhere between both, with it roots based primarily in Zombie territory. REC follows abrasively inquisitive blonde Angela Vidal, a late night television reporter. REC is shot almost entirely in found-footage, excepting a short sequence in which Angela rewinds the camera and the viewer sees footage again, which I personally think is a little unrepresentative of the whole genre, but whatever. I spent the first half of the movie trying to like Angela, despite the fact that her candid moments on screen show her in a slightly unsightly light. As REC progresses is becomes almost impossible to have any sympathy at all for her, mostly because of how redundant she is. There’s a truly awful scene in which Pablo stands up on a chair to get a better view of what is happening in the next room over. Angela is not on the chair. Angela asks him eight times what he sees, and although he repeatedly tells her to be quiet, she keeps asking.
WHAT’S NOT: It seems as if every other line of spoken dialogue in REC revolves around someone telling Angela to callate. It’s a classic example of the problem I always find with substandard found-footage movies, the fact that actors can’t make up interesting, non-repetitive dialogue on the spot. REC isn’t a bad movie, but I really wish that its production had involved more zombie attacks and less shaky camera work. By virtue of setting out to create a found-footage movie, I feel that its almost impossible not to do both the actors and the creative initiative of the piece a disservice. This is not to say that there aren’t masterpieces of the genre out there, Blair Witch is one of my favorite horror movies. It’s just so hard to see all these movies try to follow suit and fall so very flat.
*You may want to read the breakdown of my rating system or my glossary of terms before continuing.*
BASIC (15/25)
Plot: 3
Dialogue: 3
Setting: 2
Acting: 4
Uniqueness: 3
CHARACTERS (14/30)
Protagonist: 5 (Angela Vidal)
Antagonist: 5 (Zombies)
Sidekick characters: 4 (Pablo)
TIME LINE (11/15)
Opening: 5
Title sequence: 4
Ending: 2
THE “HORROR” (9/15)
Gore: 3
Suspense: 3
Special effects: 3
MOTIVES (9/10)
Protagonist motive: 5
Antagonist motive: 4
Was it scary: 3
Overall: 61
This House is Haunted 