Back in Barcelona, in the building at the start of the outbreak, a team of military operatives were sent to pick up a crucial part of the crisis needed to put together the reasons behind it. That was a camera used by a television crew which had captured footage of the events leading up to the spread of the zombie danger across the city, which had killed thousands but now the authorities hope is under control. Even so, two of the four man team have to be shot dead by their colleagues when they are bitten so as not to infect anyone else, but the camera gets out and onto a nerve centre of the control operation - on a ship in the Atlantic, off the coast of Spain where they toil desperately to find a cure.
REC was a sleeper hit out of Spain, and in the overloaded landscape of twenty-first century zombie flicks, not to mention twenty-first century found footage and mockumentary horror movies, it stood out for its deft approach and handling of a claustrophobic location mixed with a neat atmosphere that may have been constrained by budget, but nevertheless conveyed a sense of an outbreak that was genuinely perilous, even if only because if you were watching it you would likely have seen a zombie film before, indeed you may well have seen more than a few. That familiarity with the rules of the genre was not vital for enjoyment, but it was satisfying to watch events play out according to the way you thought they should.
REC 2 was more of the same, introducing a supernatural element that bolstered what had gone before perfectly fairly, and kept the found footage aspect which again pleased the fans. But oh dear, when REC 3 was released, the two directors of the first couple of instalments having decided to split their tasks between two films, the grumbles were heard that they were messing with the formula, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, shooting themselves in the foot, you name it they were criticised for it, that in spite of the third entry being pretty entertaining and streets ahead of many on the zombie bandwagon. Alas, REC 4 was taken more or less the same way, with the complainers the most vocal, unhappy that they decided to wrap it all up like this.
But if the fourth one exhibited a shade less imagination than the three that came before it, it didn't mean that by going the Aliens route and turning the TV reporter heroine of the initial two into a Ripley stand-in they didn't know what they were doing. Actually this was fair enough, and though there were perhaps too many cues taken directly from the James Cameron hit (and the third part, now you mention it), once this got going it displayed the director's skill with keeping the action rocketing along, in the process not allowing us to stop and start wondering that there may be the odd flaw in the plotting, because if you did that you plainly were not caught up in the spirit of the thing. While suggesting the two original directors had differing goals, the new location out to sea guaranteed a similar panicky claustrophobia returned, at least.
Ángela (Manuela Velasco), the reporter, finds herself on the ship with no memory of how she got there (and that turns out to be unimportant anyway), along with some other survivors - or are they better described as "patients"? The head of the crew is dead set on curing the disease, though as we have seen should we be paying attention to previous efforts he's actually looking for a parasite, which gives us another analogy in The Thing, though the fact remained this owed more to Cameron that John Carpenter, which in the time it was unleashed on the world was a nice change, though the eighties influence on the genre cinema of thirty years later was still dominating. You could argue it took a little too long to get the mayhem underway, but all this narrative establishment paid off once it did, nothing too complicated but watch Ángela's biggest fan Nic (Ismael Fritschi) to see where things were going. It was also refreshing that this genuinely did seem to be the end of the series, as promised - or at least until more remakes began, we'd already had one, after all. Music by Arnau Bateller.
