A veritable car-wreck of a movie, REC Genesis systematically subverts everything that made the first two Spanish zombie virus films so compelling and leaves us with a stinking, putrid, ill-conceived mess. And that should definitely not be viewed as any kind of a recommendation!
Directed and written by Paco Plaza – notably without Jaume Balagueró, with whom he shared creative duties on REC 1 and 2 – the film shambles through a graveyard of unfunny jokes, non-existent scares and puny acting. Dispensing early on with the handheld camera approach of the first two instalments, the clear intention (summed up by a top of the range camera getting smashed to bits by a blander than bland hero figure) is to put the action into a more Hollywood-like setting. This as it turns out is a minor mistake. The real villains of the piece are a lame setting, a horrible mish-mash of styles and a confused, badly arranged script. Seemingly attempting to channel Tarantino, The Evil Dead films and the worst excesses of the Romero imitators, what’s left is a boring, uninspired, festering corpse of undead-waste.
The film begins with the wedding of Koldo and Clara, presented in familiar camcorder fashion and as it turns out, the only reasonably worked out segment of the film. What follows is infected (see what I did there?) by a terminal incompetence and dismal production. Aside from the dreadful acting and written on a fag packet script, this travesty also includes a shockingly bad soundtrack, summed up by cheese-ball symphonic strings mixed with flamenco renditions of The Damned’s Eloise. Torture horror certainly…
Apparently Balagueró is returning for the fourth instalment, but how much damage he can repair to the wounded franchise remains to be seen. Probably best to pretend that this one never happened…
Review by Robert W Monk
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