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[REC]2
The living dead get the Blair Witch treatment when the makers of 'While You're Asleep', a late-night Spanish TV schedule filler, find themselves trapped in a quarantined apartment block full of flesh-eating stiffs
As a sub-genre in the wider, weirder world of exploitation films, the faux documentary has a short but fascinating history. Check out the 'found' footage of (genuine) animal slayings and (non-genuine) natives impaled on poles in the highly questionable Cannibal Holocaust; the cerebral, post-mortem chills of The Last Broadcast; or the victory of brains over budget that conjures scares from the sparest of premises in The Blair Witch Project. In 2008 George A Romero returned with the similarly themed Diary Of The Dead, but if every fledgling filmmaker is to be castigated for treading a similar path to the granddaddy of the genre, we'd all be up Boggy Creek with a stickman for a paddle. Made up of a near-continuous live feed of zombies pretty much continually feeding on the living, [Rec] is to Diary what The Blair Witch is to The Last Broadcast. Shrill, sweaty and determinedly of-the-moment, there's no acknowledged directorial vision interposed between us and the events unfolding. These feel captured rather than choreographed, with a lot of the SFX happening not just in-camera (that is, without digital trickery), but on camera. That [Rec] lacks the awesome cumulative tension of its forebears-- even though it's better shot, acted and scripted - is down to one factor. Having seen numerous zombie films before, the audience is always one step ahead of the characters, who remain, necessarily and sometimes literally, in the dark. Flicking between banal TV business and screechy onslaughts of ravenous corpses, [Rec] is, for the most part, bizarrely unlovable even when it's doing everything right. As peppy presenter ??ngela (Velasco) shrieks instructions to her intrepid but unseen cameraman Pablo, you never get the sense that they are acting. Even the vapid, plot-advancing vox pops, and the constant updates and retakes that hamstring reality TV feel authentic, although 'While You're Asleep' won't be bothering the BAFTAs anytime soon. So why is [Rec] no more gripping than an ambitious episode of 'Casualty', even when zombified fat chicks are hurling themselves at the camera - and the cameraman? The answer, somewhat unfairly, is that watching fiery Iberians going bolo is no more fun than being a fiery Iberian going bolo. It's also surprisingly hard to be scared when the immediacy of the format forbids you from caring about the characters. But all's not lost. Just when [Rec] seems to have resigned itself to being an efficient oddity in an out-of-steam subgenre, the action moves upstairs to a creepy penthouse. The ensuing finale, a petrifying night-vision sequence that tops Clarice's trial by fire in The Silence Of The Lambs, will pin you to the seat. It seems zombies aren't the only things that can come back from the dead. Verdict An unexceptional workout for the adrenaline glands nudged up several notches by a climax that will cause muchos trouser trauma to all but the recently deceased. |
