REC3:Génesis takes place on the same day as the previous films in the series, but this time in a far more open and daylit space – at a wedding in a luxury stately home in Spain. Things kick off in traditional REC style: shot in a camera POV style following the build up to and immediate aftershow of this big wedding between Clara and Koldo. Ah, and what a ceremony it is! They’ve done alright for themselves, able to have a big wedding bash in such an enormous house – seemingly bereft of any staff of owners but with a bitchin’ sound system that you can hear from anywhere in (and even under) the building. The perfect place for a good old knees-up. It does happen to be right next a graveyard where some mysterious people dressed in hazmat suits are ‘spraying for bugs’, but that can’t mean anything bad, can it?
Well as is often the case with zombie movies one of the attendees has turned up with a bandaged up wound on his hand. We didn’t see exactly how he got this, but he mentions that he is a vet who was bitten by a dog earlier in the day. (Surely just a coincidence that the little girl resident from REC1 had said that her dog had gone to the vet for being ill just as the zombie outbreak occurred in her apartment?)
Somewhat surprisingly this vet dude gets progressively more crazy as the party goes on, possibly due to alcohol, possibly not… Finally his illness starts to take over and he goes a little bit too crazy and starts attacking people and spitting blood all over the place. Damn, that dog he’d been treating must’ve been infected with a fast acting rabies or something?
All the while this is being recorded on video cameras by the guests, but this doesn’t continue for long. In what is one of the greatest (non-gory) moments of the film the torch is metaphorically passed from the REC of old to the REC of the future, and the POV format is ditched (really quite cleverly) and we’re now treated to a far less restricting and traditional approach to a zombie movie.
It’s not only the filming style that is more traditional than the previous films in the series, but the story and style too. The film becomes a good old-fashioned zombie movie, something we haven’t had many of in recent days. So what is a traditional zombie movie then? Well, one that involves running and hiding from the ghouls, some bickering and arguing, many great laughs and more importantly some gruesome zombie deaths – being dispatched in a variety of ingenious (and gory) ways.
The characters here are all superb and really play to the films strengths. There are the typical hero / heroine in Koldo and Clara, some great comic relief guys – (spongebob, sorry, John Sponge and the appropriately named ‘Royalties’ to name a couple) and a few useful exposition types who help further the plot and provide contextual links to the REC mythology.
So, as it’s a more traditional zombie film how does it fit into the REC universe? Well apart from being filmed predominantly away from the POV style, not being set inside a dark apartment and also playing more for laughs than for scares, it fits surprisingly well. They same mythology of the zombies is intact, it links in quite nicely to the previous films and provides a few more clues as to the origin of these creatures. Sure, it’s a totally different beast to 1 and 2 but that’s no bad thing. Sticking with an old formula for a third film in a series would have been a safe and potentially dull route to take, whereas with Génesis the series has been given a good shove into a new direction which should help make the final (and apparently very dark and serious) part 4 stand out just as well.
Gore Score B
Norks Score F
originality Score C+
Overall Score B+