George Romero’s zombies gave way to Danny Boyle’s zombies, and that has led us on the path to Spanish zombies. Rec 3: Genesis starts in the mode of its predecessors, found footage shot on video camera, only to go full bore zombie, much to the delight of its selective yet discerning audience.
The first two Rec movies were centered on buildings where evil dwells and claustrophobia. Rec 3: Genesis starts like an amateur wedding dvd and proceeds with that conceit, waiting a full 20-minutes to actually reveal the title and the fact that what we’re watching isn’t actually the nuptials of a happy couple but the start of a zombie plague.
We observe the escalating libations of a wedding ceremony as captured by a cinéma vérité spouting cameraman, himself a hired hand, as well as a relative of the bride using a lower grade camera. An uncle has revealed that an animal bit him earlier in the day. You know where this is going.
At about the half hour mark Rec 3 switches its narrative mode from single person point-of-view (the video cameras are destroyed) and becomes an objective battle of the few wedding party survivors to stay alive. Some don armor vestments found in a church. True to the nature of the earlier films in the series, the whole good versus evil thing, Rec 3 introduces a priest who may have a way to stop the zombies. Rec 3: Genesis plays exclusively this weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park.
– Michael Bergeron
