7/28/2023 0 Comments Rec 2007 ratingThe hideously emaciated Madeiros (male actor Javier Botet played the desiccated girl in all of the films) is as nasty a “villain” as you’ll find in any 2000s horror films, skulking about in the dark, visible only through the ghostly glow of the camera’s night vision function. The extended climax in the supposedly abandoned penthouse and its attic is particularly unsettling (the final shot is simply unforgettable). Balagueró and Plaza milk the stream-lined story for every drop of tension as the survivors battle not only the every-growing horde of demonically-possessed screeching dead but a rising tide of paranoia, panic, racism and violence in their own ranks. Bartlett and Kevin Gates’ The Zombie Diaries and is the pick of the crop, a stripped back, relentless and often genuinely frightening film. There were two other found footage zombie films doing the rounds in 2007, Romero’s Diary of the Dead and Michael G. We barely get to see poor old Pablo but Manuela Velasco is great as the brave and resourceful Ángela and was on course to become a minor genre star, appearing in two of the three sequels.īy necessity, it’s a fairly simple story and its that simplicity that counts in its favour. The mayhem is the very thing they need to lift them out of the rut of the While You’re Asleep slot (“then who watches it?” wonders fireman Manu (Ferrán Terraza) when he learns the title of the show). Casting the two leads as a television team also gets around the often-problematic question of why people bother to keep filming when the shit hits the fan – these guys are pros who think they’re onto the scoop their careers so of course they keep shooting. is a cut above the average thanks to an intriguing story that doesn’t end in the place you thought it might and a likeable leading character you actually want to survive the ordeal. After this found footage was indeed everywhere, annoying more viewers than it enthralled though the more interesting ones ( Lake Mungo (2010), Megan Is Missing (2011), The Borderlands (2013)) that actually had stories and characters as well as shaky cameras were valid films in their own right. Indeed was one of the next big screen hits for found footage, following just a month after Paranormal Activity (2007) and preceding Cloverfield (2008) by another two months. While this may be true of video, the format’s natural home after all, theatrically released found footage films remained hard to find for many years. It’s often believed that in the wake of the global success of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the found footage horror film was everywhere. Medeiros was sealed in the block and left to starve to death – but she’s still alive and the contagion is spreading… A health inspector tells the trapped survivors that the authorities suspect it’s been caused by a strain of a rabies-like infection but as survivor numbers continue to dwindle, Ángela and Pablo make a horrifying discovery in the penthouse – the infection has been caused by an enzyme extracted from a possessed young Portuguese girl named Tristana Medeiros ( Javier Botet) by Vatican researchers. Whatever is causing Mrs Izquierdo’s madness soon spreads through the trapped residents of the block who are killed but return as highly aggressive zombies. When they arrive, they are attacked by the old woman and the apartment block is immediately sealed off by police and military. The crew are called to help an old woman, Mrs Izquierdo ( Martha Carbonell) who is apparently trapped in her apartment and seemingly in some distress. Television reporter Ángela Vidal ( Manuela Velasco) and cameraman Pablo ( Pablo Rosso) are assigned a seemingly mundane task, to follow the night shift at a fire station in Barcelona for the late night show While You’re Asleep. Romero cross-pollinated the two genres the same year in Diary of the Dead but where Romero’s film didn’t stick to the rules and included music and camera angles that are hard to explain, stays true to the form, maintaining a single-camera viewpoint, though it also lacks the hit-and-miss, sometimes ill-developed satire of Romero’s film which it replaces with a more visceral, no-nonsense approach. Spanish directors Jaume Balagueró ( Los sin nombre/The Nameless (1999), Darkness (2002), Frágiles/Fragile (2005)) and Paco Plaza ( El segundo nombre/Second Name (2002), Romasanta (2004)) joined forces for this impressive found footage/ zombie film that gave birth to a franchise that ran to three sequels.
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