[REC]

*** - I will have to start out by acknowledging that my decision to watch this 2005 Spanish-made horror/thriller at 2:00 in the afternoon on a sunny Monday afternoon in January was probably not the best I’ve made. When watching something that relies so much on darkness and atmosphere it is probably best to attempt to match that in some respect in the viewing environment. I did not do this, largely because I have difficulty staying up past about 8:00. However, this unfortunate misstep on my part did not ruin this movie, which was actually surprisingly competently-made and had some genuine thrills and creepiness. The film follows a TV reporter and her cameraman as they are doing a story on a night in the lives of local Barcelona firefighters. After about fifteen minutes or so of set-up, two firemen and the TV crew end up going on a call to an old apartment building in order to rescue an old lady locked in her flat. That’s about when things take a rather nasty turn. It is shot with a single camera (ostensibly, the TV cameraman’s) a la “Blair Witch” and “Cloverfield” and works on a level somewhere in between those two flicks. One excellent aspect of this movie is that it dispenses with the interminable introductory portion that seems to occur in so many movies of this genre. Within ten or fifteen minutes of popping in the DVD there were people screaming and bodies flying down stairwells and blood spurting, instead of having to wait upwards of an hour for any action as is so often the case.