| Title | The golden age of horror: [REC] (2007) |
| Author | Chris Hornbostel and Grandy Peace |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | October 15, 2014 |
Chris: Have you ever heard--rather than seen--a car accident happen? You're outside and maybe a block away or more and you still pick up the sudden sound of a quick squeal of brakes and then there's a sickening crunch. It's hard to describe the sound of that impact..
Read the full articleMaybe because I was expecting...well, not much...out of this movie, it ended up hitting me like a ton of bricks. After I watched it two nights ago, I went out for a walk. It's something I do to focus my brain and think about what I want to write about. Our neighborhood has all these cute Halloween decorations up. The folks who live three houses up from me have this ghost scarecrow thing in their front yard, and as I'm walking past a gust of wind made it turn on the flimsy stake it hangs on and it faced me.
I nearly jumped out of my shoes when that happened. I mean, it was a gust of wind, but man. My nervous system must've been percolating like crazy. (I hurried past the scarecrow thing even so. Looked back twice. No other breezes made it turn around. Probably just a weird gust, right? Right??)
REC was a great movie, but in my opinion REC 2 was even better. There's going to be a new REC movie soon (REC 4 Apocalypse).
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Rec 2 could compare to the girl in the attic scene from the end of Rec. Good Lord that was a terrifying scene.
Rec 3 was dangerously close to Resident Evil territory so I'm dreading a Rec 4.
So, I was going to talk about this but was rushed over lunch when finishing my parts and forgot. But a movie [REC] reminds me of a little bit is The Raid: Redemption. It's another one of those "the entire story takes place almost entirely in the run-time of the movie" (I think technically it has about 2 minutes that don't occur during the actual raid). Dredd is another such movie. I liked Dredd but loved The Raid.
Impossibly, I think The Raid has like way more "stop and breath" time than [REC] does, once the action gets going. I didn't think it was possible to have less breathing room than The Raid, so go [REC]. I'm sure there are more movies that doe this but none come immediately to mind. It serves REC so well, though.
I saw Quarantine before I saw [REC] and I was surprisingly underwhelmed by it. I still liked it more than Quarantine, but it barely stuck with me at all. Reading you guys rave about it makes we tempted to give it a 2nd chance.
I would like to give Quarantine a shout-out for making the best use of the camera in a found footage zombie movie ever. The scene where the camera man uses the camera to bludgeon a zombie to death is the thing I remember best across both movies. Because it was awesome.
I feel bad for anyone who watched Quarantine first. The acting and camera work are vastly inferior (especially how they handle the old woman scene, a pivotal moment in REC) and the story is mostly spoiled when you finally do get around to seeing REC.
I watched this again over the weekend after not having seen it for a few years, and wow, I was really surprised at how scary it was. I don't know if my memory of it got diluted by other things, or what, but the whole night after I watched it I was looking over my shoulder...
