For the first "real" horror movies of this spooky season, I decided to dig back a bit to my teenage years for a film that I'd seen hyped up but which I never got a chance to see until now... and then, its sequel, because a) the first movie turned out to be awesome, and b) the second film is about as clear-cut a "Part 2" as you can get.
So let's kick off with...
[REC] (2007)
Rated R for bloody horror violence and language
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Score: 4 out of 5
I'd heard about the Spanish horror film [REC] since I was a teenager, and yet until now I was never able to get around to watching it. Together with Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield, this was one of the movies in the late '00s that helped make found footage a juggernaut in horror during that time, while also offering a unique take on the zombie movie that wore its influence from the Resident Evil games on its sleeve, right down to its heroine wearing a red leather jacket in the first act very similar to Claire Redfield's. It got a Hollywood remake in the form of Quarantine less than a year after it came out, and spawned a franchise of four movies total that I fully intend on getting into this October, especially since this movie was awesome. It's the kind of found footage movie that showcases what only this style of filmmaking can do, in this case delivering a feel reminiscent of a news report or documentary in the first half as things slowly start to go wrong before everything explodes into an intense orgy of mayhem in the second half, and while some of the early stretches can feel pretty slow, once it gets going it never stops. This is a short, sweet, and intense little movie that I'm glad I sought out, and one that easily stands the test of time even long after found footage has been run into the ground by lesser, trend-chasing filmmakers.
Our protagonists are Ángela Vidal, a reporter for the TV news program While You Were Sleeping, and her cameraman Pablo as they cover what they hope will be an ordinary night at a Barcelona fire station. They accompany two firefighters, Manu and Alex, to an apartment building for what initially seems like a routine call of the sort that the fire department usually gets concerning an old woman who injured herself and is trapped in her apartment. When they get there, however, the old woman attacks and bites one of the police officers who was also there at the scene, and what's more, when they try to leave to get help, they find that the police and military have sealed off every exit to the building, trapping them and the residents inside. Yep, Ángela and Pablo have just wandered into a zombie movie.
The first half of the film leans heavily into the found footage conceit, emphasizing the fact that Ángela is a reporter in order to justify her insistence that Pablo keep filming everything. She interviews the firefighters, the apartment residents, and the police officers as she realizes that there's a massive story breaking right under her nose, all while her and Pablo's own growing worry starts to bleed into their reporting. This part of the film can be fairly slow at times, especially in the long stretch between the first zombie encounter and when things really explode, but in the context of the movie as a whole and what it's setting up, it works. Manuela Velasco was perfectly cast as Ángela, putting her real-life background as a TV presenter in Spain to good use as she makes Ángela feel cute, awkward, and even kinda dorky at first, especially in the beginning at the fire station where she's fully playing up her most mediagenic qualities for the camera. Of course, as the film goes on and it becomes clear that this is no ordinary house call, her TV reporter persona starts to crack. She's no damsel in distress, but she's no action hero either, not in a film like this that's about ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary situation. The cast around her did just as well conveying the uncertainty that slowly consumes the apartment building before finally erupting into panic halfway through, from the mother who insists that her little girl's illness is just tonsilitis (...suuuuuure, lady, we've seen this movie before) to the doctor who tries to care for the wounded to the hazmat-suit-wearing health inspector who the authorities outside send into the building to monitor the progressing infection, fear and tension being the sort of things that cross all language barriers. Between the found footage camera and the actors' performances, the shouting matches that the characters' interactions often descended into felt raw, like I was caught right there with them in a situation that was rapidly going to shit.
And when the shit hits the fan, this movie goes balls-out. These are decidedly modern zombies in the 28 Days Later mold, fast and very hard to kill, and directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza use the first-person camera and the tight confines of the apartment building to play up the claustrophobia of the situation. This isn't a zombie apocalypse movie, but a smaller-scale story akin to a Resident Evil game set in a single building full of infected monsters, complete with the protagonists going on key hunts as they try to find a way to escape. Zombies are already scary, but they're even scarier when, instead of an open field where you can pick them off from hundreds of feet away, you're trapped with them in close quarters where you barely even have time to aim your gun before they strike. It feels more personal than the apocalyptic stakes of a lot of zombie movies. (And that stairwell shot towards the end... hot damn, that was freaky.) The film also ends by putting a unique twist on the nature of the virus that's causing the zombie outbreak, one that I knew about going into the film but which I won't spoil here. It was a neat twist that answers a lot of the questions that normally come up about the scientific plausibility of zombies while also explaining some of the unique behavior that the undead in this movie engaged in, but it's a twist that I found myself wishing the film explored in greater depth rather than saving for a twist ending. The way it's handled here felt tacked on, such that I'm not surprised that the American remake Quarantine dropped it entirely and had a more traditional zombie movie explanation. The sequels apparently focus a lot more on this, though, so I'm definitely interested in seeing how they handle it.
The Bottom Line
Yeah, this is one of the good ones. It's not a perfect movie, but it's still an all-time classic zombie film and found footage flick with plenty to recommend about it for fans of either genre.
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And the second film...
[REC] 2 (2009)
Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images and pervasive language
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Score: 3 out of 5
[REC] 2 is 75% of the sequel I wanted to the first [REC]. It picks up right where the first movie ended, the cameras recording the footage now being the helmet cams of the GEO police unit (what Spaniards call a SWAT team) sent into the apartment building to mop up the mess, together with a scientist from the Ministry of Health named Dr. Owen who turns out to not be precisely who he seems. And when it was focused primarily on those characters, it rocked my socks off, delivering an amped-up zombie flick that gets right down to business in the first ten minutes, never lets up, and feels like a logical and meaningful continuation of the first film's story... except for a lengthy stretch of the second act that drags the film to a screeching halt as we switch focus to a trio of dumbass teenagers who sneak into the building as it's being sealed off, their main role in the story turning out to be little more than a plot device that could've been accomplished in a far less annoying manner. It wasn't enough to completely derail the film, but it was still a glaring weak spot holding it back from its predecessor's greatness. Make no mistake, though, this was still a very good movie. The parts I liked were nearly on par with the first film and even helped elevate it in my eyes, such that, if you're getting into this series, I highly recommend watching the first two movies back-to-back and treating them as one long zombie flick. (It helps that these are both rather short movies, their combined runtime coming in at well under three hours.) It may not be as good as the first, but it's still a damn good companion to it, the two films together standing tall as highlights of both found footage and modern zombie movies.
(Oh, and full spoilers for the first movie from here on out. I alluded to a big twist as to the true nature of the zombies in my review of the first movie, and I'm gonna spill the beans right here, because this movie does so right away and makes it central to its plot. You have been warned.)
The first movie ended with the reveal that, while its zombies may have looked like the victims of something like the T-Virus at first glance, there was actually something else going on. You see, it turns out that the "infection" here has a demonic component, less Resident Evil and more Evil Dead. Specifically, the Catholic priest/scientist Father Albelda, with the full blessing of the Vatican, had captured a demon-possessed Portuguese girl named Tristana Madeiros and experimented on her, studying the progression of an uncontrolled possession in order to find ways to more effectively combat demons. In the process, he discovered that her possession was contagious, specifically spread through blood and saliva like a disease. This being a zombie movie, something obviously went wrong and Madeiros broke out, killed Albelda, and unleashed a demon-zombie plague on the Barcelona apartment complex where Albelda had his secret laboratory. This is all relayed to both the viewer and the GEO team in the first fifteen minutes as they learn that Dr. Owen isn't actually from the Ministry of Health, but is in fact a priest who's been sent to the apartment by the Vatican in order to recover Albelda's research and a sample of Madeiros' blood so they can continue his studies.
In short, this isn't just the Catholic version of a zombie movie, one where the undead are literally controlled by demons from Hell, it's the Anime Catholic version of a zombie movie, one where the Vatican has a full-blown research division dedicated to using capital-S Science to send the Devil's spawn back to Hell and the priest proves just as adept at killing zombies as the GEO team is. And it is awesome. This is a movie that, having already established what happened in this apartment in the first movie, dispenses with the slow burn and comes right out swinging as our protagonists are assailed by the undead from the jump. They find themselves quickly overwhelmed, such that you can't really call this an action movie, but there is a lot more emphasis on zombies getting gunned down than before. If the first movie was like a Resident Evil game, then this one is like the part in a Resident Evil game right after you've discovered a suspiciously large quantity of ammunition and healing items, where you know the mayhem and difficulty are about to get jacked up and you're about to fight either a boss monster or a gigantic horde of zombies. All the while, the film fully exploited the fact that the zombies were demon-possessed rather than just slyly hinting at it like most of the first movie did, letting them pull all manner of tricks straight out of possession flicks like imitating people's voices, stopping in their tracks in the face of prayer and holy objects, messing with perceptions of reality, and even directly taunting the protagonists like Pazuzu mocking Father Karras in The Exorcist. I compared it to Evil Dead earlier, but it really feels more like the Evil Dead remake than anything, a dead-serious version of the idea of demonic zombies that plays it for unflinching survival horror.
It helps that, just like the first movie, we got a great cast of characters to accompany us on this journey. Dr. Owen assumes the protagonist role by default as the guy with the most motive for being in the building beyond it just being his job, his dedication to his mission of eradicating evil often crossing the line and putting the GEO team in direct danger to the point. Jonathan Mellor made this guy feel like a priest out of an exorcism movie who wandered into a zombie movie, looked around, and decided "y'know what, I'm just as needed here, so it's time to kick ass for the Lord!" Of the GEO team, while Markos dies too early to leave an impression, and Rosso was there just to serve as the main audience viewpoint (fun fact: he was played by the same actor/cinematographer who played Pablo in the first movie -- his name is Pablo Rosso, appropriately enough), Larra and Chief Hernandez both have a lot of friction with Dr. Owen, largely over the fact that they just wanna get the hell out of there, having never signed up for zombies, demons, or any of this shit. Larra in particular gets a great scene where he gets cut off from the rest of the team and finds himself with his back against the wall in the face of a zombie horde that will probably stick with me for some time as some all-out great, nail-biting zombie action. Ángela Vidal also returns, revealed to have somehow made it through the ending of the first movie in one piece and emerged as its sole survivor, having taken a few lessons in badass in the process and now feeling a world away from the sweetheart TV hostess she started out as. Once again, Manuela Velasco steals the show, especially once it becomes clear that her experience has taken a toll on her psyche.
Which makes it that much more puzzling why this movie suddenly decided to stop in the middle so it could introduce a whole new cast of characters who weren't half as interesting as the ones we started with. Just as it felt like this movie was really taking off, it suddenly switches perspective to a trio of neighborhood teens who snuck into the apartment building behind a firefighter and a resident who was looking for his wife and daughter (the mother and the infected girl from the original). These little brats contributed nothing except to annoy me, their perspective doing little to flesh out the story in a way that couldn't have been accomplished any other way, and they're unceremoniously dropped from the film once they're no longer needed. The time I wasted with them was time that could've been spent watching Dr. Owen and the GEO team, fleshing out their characters and the divide between them, and their sole contribution to the plot could've been filled by literally anyone else, including the firefighter and resident who they followed in. The resident in particular could've been a source of some great horror had he been the focus, especially the thought of him being confronted by his zombified, demon-possessed wife and daughter, yet he's little more than a plot coupon to get the kids into the building. In a movie that's only 85 minutes long, twenty minutes with these kids felt insufferable.
The Bottom Line
[REC] 2 is a very good sequel to a great movie. It's held back from similar greatness by one bafflingly subpar segment dragging it down, but it's still a damn fine movie that makes for a great companion to the first.
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