REC [Rec] 2007 | Movie Review

REC movie [Rec] 2007 is is a 2007 Spanish-found footage horror film. The film is rated R and it is an hour and  18 minutes long. 
 

REC [Rec]  Review

REC movie  is written and directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. It stars Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, and Jorge-Yamam Serrano.

Rec movie is a found footage movie where a news reporter follows a group of firemen into an apartment building and they find themselves locked inside under quarantine when a mysterious virus starts to spread amongst the inhabitants of this apartment building.

And it’s all from the perspective of this reporter and her cameraman. And what the film does really well is a few things right off the bat. When it comes to found footage.

Found footage movies face a considerable challenge to have certain rules. Certain things have to stay in place for the movie to exist.

One of them is that there has to be an excuse for why the cameras keep rolling. Rec has a great one. The lead is a reporter.

And you can tell she’s kind of doing something that’s a bit fluffy just wandering around with some firemen at night filming the fire station, they’re playing basketball. It’s all fun.

She kind of wishes that a call would happen so she could get some footage of a fire being put out. So she wants a good story.

And when she stumbles across a good story, clearly that’s something that could catapult her career into the stratosphere.

But the other reason they want to keep filming, which is even better is that the residence of the apartment building feel that they’re being mistreated by the authorities, the fact that they’re not being led out, they can’t even go back inside their own apartments.

And so they want evidence of this ill-treatment by the authorities. So they keep asking her to continue to film because they think they’re being treated poorly by the police. These are great reasons for why this movie is from a found-footage perspective.

Something else that all found footage movies should try to do is have real moments, moments that don’t feel scripted. And Rec has a lot of them.

For instance, early on, the reporter realizes that she’s standing on the bad side for the way her hair falls on her face and asks if they can switch to the other side.

Or when they’re in the fire truck. She asks them to sound the alarm and then asks if she can repeat the take because she called it an alarm instead of a siren.

There’s also a moment where she’s trying to interview a young girl and her mother into, and the reporter has to stop and say, Can you please not talk? Because it makes it difficult to focus in on this interview when someone else is talking in the background.

Moments like this outside of what Rec is mostly known for, which is pure bloody chaos make the movie work really well. And it shows that the filmmakers cared more than just showing a bunch of zombie action.

They wanted to make this feel like a real-world and they succeeded. This movie is extremely scary. It’s one of the best found-footage movies ever made because you really do feel as if you have stumbled into 78 minutes of reality.

All of the zombie stuff is so well captured because it doesn’t feel big. Every moment of violence and gore feels extremely well-timed. It doesn’t feel like gore just to have gore in the movie. It feels like it should be there.

Every character feels very realistic. They don’t do too much with characterization. You really don’t know that much about anybody in the film, but everyone feels like a real person.

When they start screaming and yelling at each other. It feels like real people arguing. You feel the heat of the moment. You understand why everyone is terrified.

And if you’ve never seen Rec, I’m gonna get into some spoilers. Just as a warning, I highly recommend it. It’s an excellent zombie film, but let’s talk about some spoilers.

When that body falls from thereon. The movie is nonstop. It’s so tense because the shots really do last a long time. It doesn’t feel like there’s too many cuts.

There are some, some that are obviously hidden camera disappears into somebody’s back for a second, the whole screen goes black and you know, that’s probably where they hit a cut. 

But the budget they had to work with and the fact that they actually hired fantastic fucking actors, and at least for me, none of them are recognizable faces. That also makes the movie feel very realistic.

The American remake Quarantine had a lot of recognizable faces, and even though it was essentially shot for shot, it didn’t work even remotely as well because it really did feel kind of like a copy and paste movie.

What’s also great about Rec, as I’ve already mentioned, is that it’s 78 minutes long. This movie does not overstay its welcome. It has barely an ounce of fat. It is so incredibly tight.

Everything that happens in the movie should happen. The slowest part of the movie is when they interview a few of the residents after some of the initial chaos windows for a moment.

You learn about some of the people. There’s some fun comedy where one of the residents thinks they have to pose properly and get their good side.

It’s the slowest part of the movie, but even that stuff is interesting because you’re with these characters and you’re going to see them turn, and knowing a little bit about them is helpful.

But the lead-up to The Penthouse and the sequences inside of it legitimately one of the scariest most terrifying scenes ever.

I love scary movies. They’re my favorite kinds of movies. But very, very rarely do any of them actually scare me to the point where I feel real fear.

The ending of Rec legitimately fucking scared the shit out of me. I was terrified to look at the screen. It’s extremely well done. And there’s just enough questions to not only set up a sequel.

But to make it scarier when you have this random boy in the attic who swipes at the camera. And, of course, this horrifying makeup across this actor who gave an amazing performance.

There’s just enough that’s not explained to make it scarier, because there’s these small hints of things. There’s all these newspaper articles, a tape recording.

You understand something that’s going on, but not quite enough to fully grasp it. And so when you see the shit, you’re like, wait, what is this thing? What is this? And it’s scarier. It’s just so much scarier than if you knew everything going in and everything was very clear.

And honestly, I watched Quarantine directly after watching Rec recently. I had never seen Quarantine before, and I’ve seen Rec many times. And I was extremely struck by how literally copying and pasting the same movie made it worse.

It was like Gus Van Sant psycho. You cannot capture lightning in a bottle, even if you mathematically assemble it in the same way you just can’t.

Rec is one of the best found-footage movies of all time. If you’ve never seen it, please do check it out this Halloween. It’s awesome.

 So I am going to give REC [Rec] a B-Plus.

Guys thank you so much as always for reading the review of REC [Rec]. See you next time.

REC [Rec] Trailer

Check out the trailer of the Horror, Mystery, Thriller film  REC [Rec] 2007.