A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Friday, October 24, 2025

REC (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007)

Manuela Velasco in REC
Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Teraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Pablo Rosso, David Vert, Vicente Gil, Martha Carbonell, Carlos Vicente, Maria Teresa Ortega, Manuel Bronchud, Akemi Goto, Kao Chenmin, Maria Lanau, Claudia Silva, Carlos Lasarte. Screenplay: Jaume Balagueró, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza. Cinematography: Pablo Rosso. Production design: Gemma Fauria. Film editing: David Gallart. 

Messy and unsettling, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's REC takes the camera's viewpoint as a vapid young TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman (cinematographer Pablo Rosso, voiced by Javier Coromina) tape an episode for a TV series. They ride along with a small crew of firefighters on what sounds like a routine call: The screams of a woman in a locked apartment have disturbed her neighbors. Once there, however, they and the cops who join them not only encounter the unexpected, but they're also forced to stay in the building after it's quarantined by the authorities for a suspected biohazard. I wish that Velasco's character had not been allowed to grow so screechy and hysterical as the events they encounter escalate -- they're nerve-wracking enough on their own -- but REC does the "found footage" approach to horror as well as I've ever seen it done. Though it winds up as pretty much a routine "zombie virus" movie, it has a bloody actuality that's quite disturbing.
 

Posted by
Links: , , ,