Vern No Likey [Rec]

In my review of the abysmal Paranormal Experience, I recommended a few recent movies that made the whole hand-held camera slash found footage gimmick work, one of which was the Spanish horror movie [Rec], which was remade in the US as Quarantine. This week Outlaw Vern takes a whack at [Rec] and it turns out he doesn’t like it much. Oddly enough, I found myself in agreement with most of his review, though the movie worked well enough for me. In particular, Vern nails the genre conventions that now govern these movies:

After so many of these fake video movies you start to see that there’s a formula, or at least the gimmick of pretending it’s a real video forces it into a formula because you feel you have to explain the same things every time. You have the opening where you explain why they’re originally filming (documentary about urban legend, student horror film, video for friend who’s leaving) and everything is normal, they do non-horror shit for a while (interview locals, put on mummy costumes, hang out at a party) but the the shit hits the fan (weird sounds and objects left at camp site, Statue of Liberty decapitated, zombie apocalypse). Then they have to explain why they’re still filming (”Someone has to know what happened here!”). Usually somebody (annoyed friend, pushy soldier) tries to get them to turn off the camera, so they say that it’s off but it’s still on, heh heh, sneaky. At some point the camera does stop or mess up (end of tape, battery dead, accidentally bumped button) so the story can skip over some time. Toward the end they learn more information about what’s going on (in this one it’s that old classic The Wall of Newspaper Clippings) and then they come face to face with the big danger and the tape ends before you find out what happened. Spoooooooky.

Paranormal Experience hits every one of these plot points in an especially ham-handed manner.