Three new films this month, all quite different.
Rec 2 picks up immediately after the ending of Rec, with a SWAT team about to enter the quarantined Spanish apartment building. Rather than shy away from the weak ending of the original, it embraces it and builds a fairly silly plot around it. There’s all-sorts of terrible tell-don’t-show storytelling on display here, and that undermines a good amount of the work done elsewhere. Despite a forgettable plot, the audio-visual design is fantastic: in-camera glitches, sound breaking up and distorting in just the right way to make you squirm, and THAT scene with the boy. Genuinely creepy horror in places, let down by the plot changes. (See my Rec 2 Twitter review).
The Killer Inside Me is, if nothing else, beautifully shot with art-direction in the opening credits that most films can’t muster in 90 minutes. The look throughout is striking, whether we’re observing the lead sitting in a chair or brutalising another character needlessly, and he brutalises other characters frequently. There are several fairly uncomfortable, difficult scenes here; scenes of reasonably extreme violence against women (in the context of modern cinema, at least). While they’re extremely powerful and shocking moments, they sit amongst a plot that for the most part lurches along and doesn’t really get anywhere. The film is purposefully rife with ambiguity as we, the audience, try to fill in the gaps around why the lead is such a cruel and twisted man. Sadly, it’s just not interesting or well-done enough to really bother. The idea of irredeemable characters, monsters for their own sake, has surely been done better than this many times before. (See my The Killer Inside Me Twitter review).
Finally, Shrek Forever After marks the supposed end of the series, with Dreamworks claiming they won’t make any more. I wish they’d stopped at least one film back (perhaps two). The latest film in the series is definitely not a classic, lacking the originality, creativity or joy of the original Shrek. The plot is fairly forgettable and largely unimportant, with the majority of the laughs (and there are some good laughs in there) coming from little visual cues. The source material here has been stretched a little too thin: had this been an episode in a 25 minute cartoon series, you wouldn’t have noticed the difference. Okay, but not great. (See my Shrek Forever After Twitter review).
While I didn’t think any of the films this month were particularly great, the winner is Rec 2. Despite a fairly nonsensical plot, it delivered where it mattered: providing a horror-filled, cinematic experience.