Angela Vidal is an action news reporter. She also cute as a button and I'd like to show her my chimichanga in the men's room of a Taco Bell someday is she'll let me. I figure she could use a good laugh. Angela hosts one of those fluff pieces called “While You're Asleep” where she follows around the brave men and women who take up important graveyard shift jobs, like cops, firefighters, and the fine folks at Dunkin' Donuts. Making your donuts dunkable all day everyday! True heroes. Tonight Miss Vidal is covering a local firehouse and not getting the excitement she'd hoped for. Life can't always be Backdraft after all. Thankfully it can't even be Ladder 49 all the time either, cuz the last thing we need is more John Travolta looking all old and swollen and continuing to deny his own homosexuality. Ever seen Stayin' Alive? Case closed.

When the 'house gets a call about a woman trapped in her apartment, Angela and her cameraman Pablo jump on the opportunity to get something on tape other than city workers sitting around eating dinner and playing basketball. When they get to the apartment building they find a police car waiting outside and tenants in the lobby claiming they'd heard one of their neighbors screaming. The woman in question is a lonely old broad without any friends or family who sits home with her cats all day. Meeting up with a pair of piggies, the group breaks down the geezer gal's door and find her covered in cuts and blood and with more than a little bit of crazy caught in her eye. Sure enough, before you can say “28 Days Later was not a sequel to that Sandra Bullock movie where she's trying to fight alcoholism with comedy hi-jinx”, the crazy cat lady sinks her dentures into a cop's face and has to be pried off! Before the crew can get the injured guy's face patched up, they head to the lobby only to find that the building's been barricaded and quarantined by the health department as part of a BNC (Biological, Nuclear, Chemical) protocol sometime during the last 5 minutes while they were upstairs. Damn, the Spanish authorities don't waste any time when it comes to sacrificing an apartment building full of people to cover up whatever it is they're involved in! Democracy in action!

While the professional men try to get what's-his-name's face from leaking any more, Angela makes my day and wastes no time in taking off her jacket so we can all look at her standard issue movie heroine white undershirt. What do you think the chances are that the building's sprinklers are going to come on at some point? There goes that Enzyte again... While the remaining cop Sergio wants Pablo to turn his camera off, Angela transforms into Katie Couric on PCP and starts pushing the cop, telling him to fuck off because there's a story to be covered and they've covering it, motherfucker! When they all finally calm down and try to figure out how to escape, the relative calm is shattered when one of the firemen swan dives headfirst into the lobby from the third floor and gets turned into a moist red smear! Given the rabid old woman's screams reverberating throughout the building, I'd say things can only go downhill for everybody from here... which is kinda the whole point of the movie... so let's get on with it!

As time goes on, the people start to realize that all lines of communication have have been cut from the building, including cellular and broadcast signals. They're not just quarantined, they're full on isolated. Sergio (who put three bullets in Grandma Crazy Pants) tries to pull rank on the gang and keep them in line while they all await their inevitable fates on top of government dissection tables, but the last thing these people want right now is an authority figure pushing them around from the inside while his buddies are doing it from the outside too. The smart money is on him being one of those assholes who either ends up killed by a zombie or killed by the remaining humans who have had enough of his bullshit. The long shot is on Sergio turning against his superiors to help the people in the building escape and then either getting killed by a zombie or gunned down by government agents. The “hail mary bat shit crazy” bet is that he's randomly killed when an elephant falls from the sky and turns him into pork paste. I will pay anyone reading this $100 tax free if that last one happens. It'd almost be worth it too just to see!

It just so happens that one of the tenants in the building, Guillem, is a med student and he's well stocked in first-aid materials to care for the wounded. He's going to wish he was a student of whoop ass-fu and anti-zombie survival training though once his impromptu patients start taking their cues from a George Romero movie and try to bite every piece of flesh they get within reach of. For some reason nobody is allowed to return to their apartments, so everybody gathers in the basement, where Angela takes turns interviewing them. It turns out a little girl in the group is also sick, so don't be surprised if we eventually get a Night of the Living Dead moment where she's giving mommy an amateur appendectomy with a trowel. Apparently her doggy hasn't been feeling too hot lately either, so be ready for the inevitable Resident Evil pants wetting there too. Oh, and if you thought that for once you'd get a movie where a group of people trapped in an enclosed space manage not to turn on each other within their first 20 minutes together, I'm sorry to inform you that the human drama is mandatory in movies like this and cannot be avoided. As always the ignorance of the characters comes through in these moments too, including a bit where a fruity old queen blames the mysterious contagion on his Asian neighbors' regular consumption of raw fish... brilliant. When everybody else learns that the grandfather of the Asian family has been sick in bed this whole time, the xenophobia ramps up and they immediately become the target of accusations in regards to the unexplained breakout. Unless this is your first horror movie, you can pretty much guess where everything leads from here.

[REC] is a fairly unassuming flick at first look. Though the story gives us a good reason for Pablo to keep his hardware with him at all times (he's a professional cameraman after all... plus it becomes story relevant later on), there are still times when you can't help but want to reach into the screen and strangle the man because he isn't putting the damn thing down to help anyone! Then you think about the possibility that he's frozen with terror and has to rely entirely on his occupational instinct: just keep shooting. As for the rest of the plot, we've seen it a hundred times. Maybe a thousand depending on just how much free time you have to watch horror movies. If you're as socially inept as I am, chances are you're batting quadruple digits too. The gore was very well done and not so overdone to be unrealistic, while the acting was intense. Velasco does get a little irritating and you wish you could back hand her so she'd shut up during a few scenes, but for the most part she and everyone else were just bleeding drama. Ferran Terraza, who played the main firefighter Manu? Especially good. I gotta precede the following with a “no homo”, but the guy made me tingle. And when we finally see what caused the whole debacle? Freaky. If you've ever seen Aphex Twin's video for “Come to Daddy”, well, that's all I'm gonna say about it...

Despite the predictable, overused plot, it's the psychotic pace of everything once business picks up, coupled with the best damn handy-cam I ever did see that bring everything together to birth something special. We don't get time to evaluate anything, because once the action starts it's all screaming and violence and hysteria while we panic through the one outlet we're given to watch it all fall apart with. Holy shit. Movies haven't freaked me out since I was 12. This movie freaked me fucking senseless. Anyone who knows me knows I loathe shaky cam. I still haven't seen Transformers because the threat of excessive shaky makes my blood boil. Though I'd heard good things about [REC], I knew the first-person p.o.v. was gonna bug me. Mark this day on your calenders ladles and Germans, cuz I've never been more wrong.

Balagueró and Plaza have made me a believer. Their direction is perfect. The problems with handy cam are that they're always either too “cinematically” shot, or look like they were held by an epileptic during a seizure and cause us to miss everything. The Blair Witch Project is a perfect example of the latter, and Cannibal Holocaust always struck me as an unfortunate product of the former. But with [REC], the balance has been struck. The cosmos have aligned. Everything is right in the world and when I go to bed tonight, 1984 Barbara Crampton will have passed through a rift in the space-time continuum and will be waiting for me ass nekkid and spread-eagle with the biggest, dirtiest grin on her lips.

Though I have a gnawing feeling that Quarantine is going to flub the shaky cam thing that [REC] perfected (the trailers already make it look too “Hollywood”), I have to admit that I'm now curious enough to give it a look see. I'll probably regret it, but what the fuck. I've got plenty of hours of my life left to kill, so why not.