Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Before watching REC, the only thing I knew about the movie was that an American version of it was recently made called Quarantine. Since most remakes aren't as good as the original, I decided to watch this original movie first. It's a horror movie in the style of The Blair Witch Project, but with more characters and a bigger budget. If you can handle all the first-person camerawork, then you might dig this movie. It was made in Spain and is subtitled.

This movie starts out innocently enough. A pretty young reporter (Manuela Velasco) is doing a documentary type news report at a fire station. She walks around the station doing interviews and showing off the fire trucks and other equipment, and for about the first ten minutes it actually seems like a real firehouse documentary. When a first aid call comes in, the reporter and her cameraman decide to ride along with the firemen to the small apartment building where somebody needs help.

When the firefighters and film crew arrive at the apartment, the situation goes from bad to worse in a matter of minutes. Someone gets bitten, the tenants start flipping out, and pretty soon the government calls a quarantine on the whole building and starts putting up barriers outside. On the inside, nobody has any idea what is going on, other than the people outside trying to keep something from getting out.

What I liked so much about this movie is the way that the action slowly builds from mundane interviews to screaming hysteria by the end of it all. The pacing is brilliant in how it steadily increases tension until you finally realize what is happening, and then it's total chaos. The use of a first-person camera plays very well for the way the story is told, and it works in a way that makes the viewer another character in the movie. I am so sick of close-up shots dominating cinematography these days, and I loved how the camera stayed back out of the way for most of the movie.

You may be wondering just what is going on in the apartment building, and I'm not going to tell you exactly. Some people have called this a zombie movie, but I don't think it quite fits the zombie genre although there are some similarities. Let's just say the movie makes you wait until the end to offer any kind of explanation, and what you see will be absolutely terrifying. There's a good bit of blood and gore along the way, so be warned.

In the end, I think REC is one of the most intense horror movies I have seen in a while. I wasn't too sure about the first-person view of it, but it worked really well for this style movie. I strongly recommend it. A sequel was recently made, and I'm waiting for the subtitled video to come out.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD