[•REC]3: Genesis (2012, directed by Paco Plaza) makes the same "mistake" committed by Halloween III: The Season of the Witch all those years ago: it departs from the tried and true form of a beloved franchise in order to create something new and different. This entry isn't the same variety of grim and apocalyptic one finds in its predecessors. Moreover, it departs from the series' found footage aesthetic after a lengthy prologue, and then has the gall to have a sense of its own absurdity. It laughs at itself. To an audience expecting more of the same from this series, I'm sure it was a disappointment. Me? I kinda dig it. There's something about watching a wedding go off the rails that appeals to me. I'm a hopeless romantic, sometimes.
The film opens as if it's a wedding DVD provided to the viewer by the wedding photographers. We watch a montage of the romance of Kondo and Clara, who will be tying the knot amid friends and family. Two wedding photographers are covering the action: one an amateur, a member of the family, and the other a professional who moonlights from his regular gig as a cameraman for movies. Clara is pregnant and doesn't know how to tell her fiance, even when they're standing at the altar. The guests arrive, including an uncle who is wearing a bandage on his hand where a dog has bitten him. He thought the dog was dead, he says. The wedding is lovely, but at the reception, the uncle with the dog bite begins to act strangely. He falls from a balcony above the dance floor and when help comes to him, he lashes out, biting anyone who comes near him. Soon there is pandemonium as a zombie plague sweeps through the wedding. Kondo takes shelter with the photographer, while Clara accompanies the priest who has officiated the nuptials. Kondo and Clara vow to reunite, though all the legions of hell might stand in their way...
The [•REC] movies have always indulged in some level of bait and switch. The first film begins as a bog-standard zombie apocalypse a la George Romero, then turns into something else entirely at the end. The second film does something similar, preying on the audience's expectations of how survivors from the first film might act and completely subverting them. In the case of the third film, we've abandoned the apartment complex that acted as the microcosm for the previous films in favor of a different kind of microcosm. The actual form of the film subverts expectations, too: it starts with the familiar found footage technique of the first two films, but after the title card appears twenty minutes into the film--TWENTY MINUTES!--it abandons the found footage format in favor of traditional cinematography, and aspect ratios be damned in the process. It dips back into found footage occasionally, but not as an overall structure.
For being a radical departure from the formula established in the first two installments, it manages to tie things up with images and ideas from both of its predecessors. Prime among these is the idea that the zombie plague isn't just viral, but is demonic. It expands on the end of the second film with the idea that the series' zombies are manifestations of a controlling intelligence, an idea elided by some arresting shots in which the witch character from the previous films is shown instead of the people she is possessing. There's a religious dimension to all of this, which enables the filmmakers to manipulate where the characters are able to go or where they can find refuge, because these zombies can be turned by religious impedimenta and Catholic white magic. Part of the plot is literally turned on the deus ex machina, though an instance that actually plays fair with the rules established by the rest of the film. It knows what it's doing when it dresses Kondo up in a suit of armor and sends him out like a crusading knight to rescue the maiden fair. But then it lets the maiden rescue herself.
I like to think that [•REC]3 is a wedding present from director Paco Plaza to his wife, lead actress Leticia Dolera. Not only does he dress her in a spectacular wedding gown, he centers her in the film's most outre scenes of zombie gore. By splattering her with blood and giving her a chainsaw, he's turned her into a fetish figure. Chainsaws have a long and storied career in zombie movies, in whose mighty company, this film should be unashamed. If this is indeed a wedding gift, then it's a singularly perverse one, because its ride or die romanticism goes to such an extreme and ends on such baroque imagery that it crosses the line into parody. You can either be appalled by its version of death do us part, or you can laugh at it. I laughed at the outrageousness of it, but your mileage, as always, will vary.
The whole thing seems invented to take the piss out of the doominess of the previous films. Sure, this film is as apocalyptic as its predecessors, but many of its side characters are patently ridiculous. There's the SpongeBob rip-off dude who performs as "SpongeJohn" in a round costume to avoid the copyright. There's a character who is at the wedding solely to make sure the band doesn't play songs they haven't paid royalties on. There's the professional wedding photography who is moonlighting from his job at Filmax, which is the company that produced the [•REC] films and many other Spanish horrors besides. This is the meta version of a found footage zombie film, one that even throws its own gimmick over the side. In spite of its self-awareness, it remains unsentimental even in the face of arguably the most sentimentalist life event most people ever experience. When Clara lays into attacking zombies near the end of the film, she screams "This is my day!" at them like the most terrifying bridezilla who ever walked down the aisle. When Kondo carries Clara out of the venue at the end of the film, it's a sick parody of the groom carrying the bride over the threshold of the bridal suite.
The main flaw--if you want to call it that--is that it maybe doesn't depart from the preceding films enough. When you get right down to it, only the venue has really changed, plus a willingness to laugh at itself. There's a real danger of looking at this film and deciding "been there, done that." The worldview of this movie isn't different. It's equally apocalyptic, though on a more personal scale than previously. These films probably shouldn't be called "Lovecraftian" but the general ideas are similar. They postulate that there are dark entities--demons in this series' framing--that want to pick at the fabric of reality until it comes apart. It's a plot construction that Jaume Balageuro has threaded through more of his films than just the [•REC] films and it lingers here in Balaguero's absence. This film's deviations from the original model may seem drastic at first glance, but they're mostly the equivalent of re-skinning an element of a video game. The filmmakers seem to know that they run the risk of their fans turning on them in the same way the original fans of Halloween turned on Halloween III. But, y'know? I like Halloween III and I like this film well enough even if it seems familiar. In the words of Jack Pumpkinhead, it's the same, only different.
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