[REC]

I had been wanting to see REC ever since it was on the cinema, but courtesy of an annoyingly limited run I didn’t get the chance. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of home deev, it lived up to my expectations as a tense, exciting, fast paced horror movie.

Set in Barcelona (judging by the fire-fighters jackets) it follows via hand held cameras, a magazine show news reporter and her cameraman, filming a neighbourhood  interest piece on the night shift at the local fire station. It is here we are introduced to two fire-fighters, Manu and Alex.

After sitting round twiddling their thumbs for most of the night, a seemingly mundane call comes in, and they set off on a routine job of breaking into a flat in which a woman is trapped. From the moment the hammer breaks the door the movie takes off at a lightning fast pace. We discover the inhabitants of the building have become infected with an unknown disease, turning them into rage fuelled 'zombies', similar to what happened in 28 days later actually.

Filmed handheld, it obviously conjures up comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which is no problem as both rely on almost unbearable levels of tension and stumbling through the dark with no idea of what is stalking them. However the pace is relentless, and it serves up some great, genuine scares! The start was brilliant and there are some truly startling set pieces. The tension is wound up snare tight, and it pretty much scared the bejeezuz out of me on a Sunday afternoon, so if watched late at night I'd have probably leapt out of my skin!

There are a couple of sticking points. Such as why the infection rate is so much quicker as the film goes on?  And disappointingly, it does cull somewhat too heavily from The Blair Witch in places. For a film that is pretty damn inventive and scary within the ridiculously stagnant Zombie genre, it was a shame they didn't quite manage to keep it up until the end.

Still, this is all small potatoes really, as overall I thought this film was REC-cellent!

IMDB: REC