Author Topic: [oREC]  (Read 3795 times)

abraxas

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on: April 13, 2008, 06:12:23 PM
Went to a midnight showing of this last night. Fantastic film!

SPOILERS BELOW



SPOILERS BELOW



SPOILERS BELOW

Anyone disappointed by Diary of the Dead should find this Spanish offering much more to their liking. A company of firefighters are joined on their late night shift by the crew of local television show "While You're Asleep." What begins as an uneventful night suddenly takes a dark turn when a routine call comes in from the residents of an apartment block concerned at screams emanating from the apartment of an elderly lady. When the firefighters and police break into her home, she promptly rips the police chief's throat out with her teeth.

Yes, this is a zombie film, and a damn good one.

[oREC] is a tense, claustrophobic, disorienting experience. Shot entirely from the point of view of Pablo, the cameraman unfortunate enough to have been assigned to the programme, the film makes uses of the same kind of shaky camera work as Cloverfield. This is used to great effect and provides plenty in the way of visual shocks, but the real beauty of this film is in its use of tried and tested zombie film psychology.

We're presented with a group of survivors with little tying them together - the emergency services torn between fulfilling their duties and protecting their colleagues, the residents who find themselves trapped in a situation not of their own making, the film crew determined to document what's happening - to keep filming, no matter what. In the end the key to survival is not evading the rampaging undead but putting overcoming their own differences.

Original? No. But [oREC] is perfectly executed with some particularly nice touches. The aforementioned shaky camera work adds to the sense of immediacy and impending peril. The characters are believable with nobody quite amounting to a straightforward protagonist. The zombies are particularly worth mentioning and fall somewhere between the Romero classics and the 28 Days Later "Rage" models. The most disturbing characteristic is their tendency to stand perfectly still, carefully examining their prey before advancing for the kill.

The gore scenes are somewhat conservative - there's the occasional latex flesh rip - but all in all the scares are more carefully constructed. [oREC] is inventive, shocking and will leave you pinned down, holding tight to the arms of your seat. You owe it to yourself to see this film before the inevitable shit American remake spews forth from Hollywood.[/spoiler]