(This review may contain spoilers).
REC was the first ‘found-footage’ film I ever saw and, to date, remains the most scarily effective one. I think that’s mostly because the camera acted more as an entrance for the audience into the action. The cameraman’s face was never seen and when the camera was switched off, the screen also went black.
I’ve seen a lot of zombie films. The first of those was Resident Evil. (That… was scary). This film was a bit more unique in exactly how and what caused the spread of the virus.
There’s a lot of interesting contrast with the lightheartedness at the beginning of the film and the fear that comes later. This film is in Spanish, but I did find it really easy to relate with and care about the characters. I don’t mind watching subtitled films. I think that a lot of foreign-language films have really good plots. (Which are then copied… sorry, I mean remade. Like Quarantine was a remake of this film and not anything like as good).
I hadn’t seen these actors in anything before, which made it particularly effective – and I also felt that the actors did a really good job of showing emotion. Some of the characters were less developed, but the ones that were, I did care about.
The camera was used to good effect. There’s one particularly scary moment involving the staircase and the zombies. Actually, there were quite a few scary moments that worked really well. There were also a lot of gory scenes, too. The sound was particularly effective – a couple of times, it cuts out so that the speech is really disjointed.
There are some things that don’t make very much sense, but in all, this was a pretty entertaining, scary film to watch. If you like that genre and don’t mind subtitled films, I would recommend this. Just make sure you don’t watch it first thing before you go to bed.
Ink of Blood 