REC

[REC] (2007), directed by Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró, Shout! Factory remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original Spanish theatrical 5.1, English 5.1 dub, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1038988/

Video encoded in two-pass 9 000 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English SDH subtitles for Spanish audio OCRed, proofed and corrected. English SDH subtitles for English dub and English subtitles for Spanish commentary converted to VobSub and repositioned.

Note : I'm not the biggest found footage fan, honestly, but this film nails it. It's amazingly brisk, taking less than 15 minutes to set up and get going, and then the remaining hour or so feels like a continuous, relentless panic attack, with maybe 5 minutes of calm in total. I just went through this to pick out stills, and I could feel my heart rate increasing just from that. It's in my opinion one of the best "fast zombie" movies ever, it feels authentic, makes the conceit believable, gives us just enough background to put things together, and just goes balls to the wall. The out of the left field pure supernatural twist towards the end should plain not work, but amazingly it does, and the final encounter is terrifying. Just an excellent piece of raw, nerve-wracking horror cinema.

Ángela Vidal is the host of a local TV show in Barcelona that documents what goes on in the city while most people are asleep. This particular night, she's following a team of firemen at work, and after some goofing around at the fire station, she and her trusty cameraman Pablo jump in the truck on the way to the first call of the night, an elderly lady in an apartment building who's apparently having some sort of mental break. Most of the building's tenants are in the lobby when they arrive, they meet up with a couple of police officers, and the firemen get the door open. And then... all hell breaks loose. The old woman goes berserk and bites one of the cops, when they get back downstairs, police and possibly military are sealing off the building and not letting anyone out, a fireman takes a nasty multi-story fall, and several people in the building might be infected with a mysterious disease.

The low-fi aesthetic is part of the package here, so this remaster is as good as it's going to get, and I managed to get an encode that preserves the look quite well. The 5.1 track is nice and punchy, and the English dub works too (I don't know if I like the super-gruff tone everyone on the English dub uses, on one hand, it matches the typical Spanish macho talk, but on the other hand, it sounds faintly ridiculous, so maybe just do what you should and watch it in Spanish with subtitles). The commentary track is a lot of fun, and talks about the logistics of filming something this frenetic and unpredictable, and this is just a... good(?) time all around.

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