D: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza. S: Jaume Balagueró, Luis A. Berdejo, Paco Plaza. P: Julio Fernández. Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferrán Terraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Pablo Rosso, David Vert. UK dist (DVD): Contender Home Entertainment.

This Spanish addition to the docu-horror/zombie plague genres (both tiresomely overpopulated of late) contributes little to either, sad to say; at less than 80 minutes, the production still feels padded. A few isolated moments of effective suspense do not a great thriller make, and [REC] ends, or rather stops dead, on a predictable but unsatisfactory note of despair.

Its uninspired scenario essentially revisits Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2 (1986), not exactly a high watermark of ambition. Still, the notion of a band of desperate survivors trapped in an apartment building over-run with carnivorous zombies could have been a winner, provided the concept had been done sufficient justice by writers and directors (incredibly, [REC] boasts three of the former and two of the latter). But the claustrophobic setting is never excitingly exploited; too often [REC] is content with merely traipsing future victims repeatedly up and down endless flights of stairs. Time and again this increasingly tired formula is trotted out: slowly the cast creeps up the stairs, all the while conducting a noisy argument; zombie(s) leap out; cast scream and all run downstairs again. (Well, sometimes not all.)

[REC] suffers from an irritating stop-start structure which only draws attention to the flaws and limitations of the camcorder technique. To begin with, there’s only ever a single perspective to the narrative, and while [REC]’s justification for the “found document” conceit is technically credible (the footage captured here by a TV news-team trapped in the building), the immediacy of the form is continually undermined by uninventiveness of content. Second, the obvious elisions where the camera is arbitrarily switched off are an overly-transparent means of dramatic expediency, drawing attention to the technique and shattering the illusion of realism. Finally, too much of the mise-en-scène consists of characters declaiming dialogue (loudly) direct-to-camera, which is neither dramatic, cinematic, or accidentally engaging for any other reason. The choice of location doesn’t exactly help: surely an apartment building with superior architectural qualities could have been found, offering greater scope for expanding the action. Here we’re limited to a staircase and a couple of apartments. It doesn’t exactly set the imagination on fire.

Zombie addicts will ignore the above and watch it anyway; they deserve better, though what they receive is usually more of the same. A US remake (Quarantine) followed in 2008; Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011) later shifted the action to a passenger jet. Responding to inexplicable demand, [REC] directors Belagueró and Plaza supplied their own sequels: [REC]2 (2009), [REC]3: Génesis (2012) and [REC]4: Apocalypse (2014), proving that a horse can be flogged, quite profitably, to death and beyond.