RogerBW's Blog

2007 Spanish found-footage horror, stylised as "[•REC]"; dir. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza; Manuela Velasco: IMDb / allmovie. Making a documentary about the night shift at the fire station is not going to end well.

I have an unworthy suspicion that the producers thought they were making the first found-footage zombie film… only for Romero's Diary of the Dead to come out three months earlier. But I was interested when I learned it was set in Barcelona, known for its neighbourhood the Eixemple with its fascinating apartment blocks. And what do you know, we're in an apartment block.

Well, we are in the Eixemple, but the block is not one of the interesting ones. Attack the Block a few years later managed to make a building on a sink estate both visually interesting and claustrophobic, but there's none of that here; to get atmosphere we have flappy plastic sheeting about the place, and that's it.

There's a good bit where a mother is trying to cover up what's obviously Patient Zero of this zombie outbreak, but otherwise this is your standard soap-operatic stuff, as each character in turn gets to do a bit of emoting before being eaten to death. I was never engaged or carried away, so I found myself wondering: since this is being taped rather than broadcast live, why does presenter Angela keep doing bits of narration to camera which would more reasonably get added during the edit? Oh, never mind, we're going to shake the camera again so that you can't see what's going on.

Many people rate this film far higher than I do, and perhaps it simply isn't my style, but really it has nothing to say to me that isn't said by all the other fast-zombie films. Its characters are sketched in and uninteresting, and a brief moment of anti-Catholic panic at the end can't salvage it from being the same film everyone else has made, only harder to watch.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.