[REC]3 - Genesis: 26 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

This review is probably going to be my briefest one yet.  I'm starting to firmly believe that there is the third movie of any given trilogy.  If the second one is good, the third almost always fails.   This has not been true in the case of Star Wars (the original trilogy that is) and Indiana Jones (the third is actually better than the second in my opinion and the fourth suffers the curse) whereas, in the Alien franchise, the third, while not terrible, was badly received and it's production plagued by problems due to the producers, the second and third Jurassic Park movies were pretty damn terrible when compared to the first (the third being utterly ridiculous in a bad way), and almost every slasher franchise's third film has been too awful to even be worth writing about.  With all that said, [REC]3 - Genesis can only be described as garbage.

The film takes place at the wedding of Koldo and Clara, the events of the prior films are not mentioned whatsoever, and we begin with found footage style shooting by family members at the wedding videographer.  One of the groom's Uncles, Victor,  has a bandage on his hand from a dog bite at the clinic he worked at, giving us a pretty clear idea of who is going to be patient zero in this little outbreak scenario.  Sure enough, as the wedding goes on, Victor show more symptoms until a balcony falling incident followed by a bite, followed by more infected people and there goes the wedding.

Where this film changes is that the "found footage" style is abandoned in favor of the traditional narrative style of film making with a symbolic destruction of the videographer's camera before the opening title card.  Sadly, this ends up making the film worse for wear.  The actors all become cliche's, the naturalism which enhances the chaotic terror of the opening goes out the window, and the story then becomes about the bride and groom finding each other against all odds.  People die, there's a kinda cool scene with a chainsaw, and there's blood everywhere, but ultimately that doesn't save this film from the curse.

The main area, where ANY film suffers is the writing, and this film suffers from abysmally poor writing.  This film is directed by one half of the directing team (and one third of the writing team), Paco Plaza, of the first two films and if I had to guess, his partner, Juame Balaguero probably didn't like the direction Plaza took this film because Plaza has zero involvement on the upcoming [REC] 4 - Apocalypse.  I found myself rolling my eyes again and again at the tritely pathetic direction the story took, feeling more like a collection of scenes with no real character development, and no conflict other than the possession zombies.  All in all, avoid this one.  The fourth film picks up where the second one left off (according to the synopsis on imdb) so here's hoping that film makes up for it.  What an awful film.

1 out of 5 skulls.