Rec Movie Review

Directed by Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza

Starring Manuela Velasco

Best fucking horror movie this year so far bar none. Yes this is another one of the documentary style "found footage" movies like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead but its done in the most "realistic" and best way yet of any of these types of movies. Its a shame the movie hasnt made it out of the foreign movie festival circuit and made its way stateside yet. I knew very little of it going in and it just blew me away. I cant really think of any flaws of the movie except it runs a little short.
The movie takes place in Spain and its basically about a late evening tv show that sends out a cameraman and reporter to a local fire station to film a night in the life of a fireman. The first 20 minutes or so is just walking around the fire station interviewing the different fireman and filming their mundane life while they wait for a call to respond to. Finally they get dispatched out to a building that has a disturbance about some lady locked in her apartment room. When they get there the police are there and they go to see what the disturbance is. Once they bust in, there is a fat lady covered in blood that attacks one of the officers. After shooting the woman several times they take the injured officer with a chunk bitten out of his neck down the stairs to the ambulance. Once they get downstairs the building is locked down by a gate and the whole building is surrounded by quarantine plastic. They get a message by megaphone that there is a virus that is in the building and no one can be let out. Pretty soon the fat lady that was shot goes missing because she is now a zombie.
I dont want to give too much away but lets just say from that point on the shit hits the fan and all hell breaks loose. The make up and gore is top notch, the actors are terrific and the sound effects are amazing. With the situation that is going down and how the government is behind the quarantine it is totally realistic that they would have kept filming to show what really happened behind the scenes. What I also liked was there was a few occasions when someone needed help and the camera was put down so the camera man could go help. Just little realistic touches like that added so much to the movie. The camera gets hit several times and the sound or light goes in and out just like a real camera would.
I might be in the minority but I actually think that handheld or "shaky" cam actually works better on the small screen. It just seems like, as in Cloverfield that on the big screen the shakiness is just magnified and its harder to tell what was going on. I re watched Cloverfield on dvd and I think that it is the best way to see the movie for the first time. I saw Rec on my laptop with headphones on and it was terrific. I never once got disoriented and I was fully engrossed in the movie till the last frame. The movie did end more abrupt than I was expecting, but after thinking about it I dont think it could have ended any other way and been better.
Once again this gets my highest recommendation and easily my favorite horror movie so far of the year. It has my favorite elements of a great horror movie, awesome tension built up and some great "jump" scares. On a scale of 1-10 I give this a "get a hold of this movie any way possible" 9.0 out of 10.