Attack of the Final Girls is a podcast about the horror genre, so listener discretion is advised. Please check the show notes for specific content warnings for this episode. And of course, beware of spoilers. everyone and welcome to number 80 episode 80 of attack of the final girls i'm theresa i'm juliette and uh we don't have anything planned for episode 80 not anything special just like doing what we do
Yeah. No cakes or anything. Getting around to the movie we've said we were going to do like three different times. Yeah. We're finally doing it. It's been on the list for like ever. Yeah. So the movie that we're talking about today is Wreck, the Spanish version of... the movie that then later the very next year was remade into an English language version called Quarantine. I think I've had this on the list as quarantine for a really long time. And then I was like, you know what?
I've never seen the Spanish version. So let's do the Spanish version. Yeah. And we love to talk about foreign language films on here too. Yes. And like... after seeing this one because this was my first watch of this one in particular so like I knew the story beats based off of the English language version but woe to directors who steal someone's work and then blatantly remake it almost beat for beat in their own language. I read well over the course of us watching this movie that...
This didn't even get released in the United States until after quarantine came out and after they had confirmed that Wreck 2 was going to happen. That is the story, especially in the era that this came out. from about the late 90s into the early 2000s, like in the 2010s, that was like a big thing for reasons I don't fully understand. And I'd like to research more that like...
Apparently, all we wanted to do in the U.S. was remake foreign horror films like immediately, like something would come out and do reasonably well, whether it was in Spain or Japan or France. instantly Hollywood would be like, well, we got to do our own English language version and... Most of the time they were nearly shot for shot remakes, but then they would do something like really dumb, like take an essential element of the story out and thus make a less compelling film.
I know we still do this too, but like, why? Why are we doing this? Cough, cough, speak no evil. Cough, cough. Although different. Different. And James McAvoy saved that movie. Truly, but... And like there is something to be said about drawing attention to a movie that maybe would have flown under the radar otherwise if people didn't know that it was a remake. Yeah. Like maybe more people got to see Wreck because they saw Quarantine. They were like, holy crap.
I need to go and see the OG. Yeah, maybe maybe that's the case. But you're absolutely right. Like the amount of movies that came out of Japan in the 2000s. that I have seen the English language version of, but not the original Japanese version of, is too damn high. Oh yeah, absolutely. It's wild. Imagine any mid-2000s movie that you saw. Pulse. One missed call.
The Ring, The Grudge, although The Grudge was like still pretty firmly rooted in Japanese culture, any of those. And we just got obsessed with like remaking them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we really did. And it was like, oh, well, we could destroy. distribute this movie over here and show it in theaters and, you know, give the directors and actors their flowers. No, let's just make our own. Yeah. We'll put Kristen Bell in everything and.
Who else was in those? Sarah Michelle Gellar. Sarah Michelle Gellar, yep. Naomi Watts, who was in the Ring movies. A lot of times when there are English language remakes, like not only... Are they remaking these movies shot for shot minus an element, but also like some of the cultural context can get removed? Absolutely. Yes. And I think that although.
quarantine did a good job of taking the story of Wreck and putting it into a similar sort of socioeconomic area just in California instead of in Spain.
And still having like some of that struggle, which I appreciated. There are lots of movies that don't do that very well. Right. Yes. Pulse, for instance. Pulse is an incredibly sad movie. Yeah. It is scary, but it is also... extremely sad and has to do a lot with like mental health and depression well not ours ours is like completely like a teeny bopper movie has almost nothing to do with like sadness and depression and mental health. And it really is like a totally different tone.
And that's very frustrating. Same with One Miss Call. Like One Miss Call is totally different. Anyways, I'm going to step off my soapbox about English language remakes because we were fortunate enough to be able to watch the original. Filmed in Spain. Filmed in Barcelona. Wreck. Yes. And it was directed by Jaume Balaguerro and stars Manuela Velasco as Angela and...
It was really cool to find out that she actually was a television presenter. Which I love. Yeah. Yeah. So the story of this movie is that this television presenter who does this sort of like show that she has to record late at night. It's called While You Are Asleep. And it's about like all of the things that people do while you're asleep. Like in this case, she's at a fire station. So she wants to go on a run with these.
you know, EMTs and firefighters. And she gets to do that. But unfortunately, the call that they go on evolves into this like far more complicated and sinister thing. The actress that they had cast. to play this TV presenter is actually a TV presenter. Of course, she got famous for these movies. So like she has acted since in other movies, including sequels to this movie.
the second and the fourth one, I guess. But she actually was a TV presenter. So she was able to like bring her real life expertise into being this TV presenter. And she does a really good job. And then there are so many characters in this movie. I guess you could say our main two characters are Manuela Velasco and then Alex, who's played by David Vare.
And they're kind of the main two people in this movie. You could kind of say that Pablo, the cameraman, is also a main character, but you never see Pablo. Right. Because he's behind the camera. So he is an integral character to the story, but... You never get to see him. So perhaps because he is actually filming. I mean, that would make sense. They definitely took the tack of like putting people into situations that they were familiar with. So perhaps he was actually filming the movie.
So they get to this apartment building that 911 has been called on because there has been a woman who is screaming in her apartment and she lives alone with all of her cats. So they're worried and everybody's downstairs. It's kind of in the middle of the night. And they go up to try and help her and she's covered in blood and things are going weird. And then she decides to bite one of the police officers who has been in this building with the firefighters and with Angela and her cameraman.
And chaos ensues. That's basically what ends up happening. Literally. This movie is only 70 minutes long. It's really very short. It's a very quick watch through. And it is a movie that launches you into like, I think we get five minutes of run up and then it just launches you into the shit. Yeah, you are in it. Yeah. for the next you know 65 minutes yeah we we have like five minutes of our tv presenter like talking to the firemen and
Of course, like trying on their stuff and sliding down the pole and all that stuff. The stuff that you would do if you went to visit a fire station, right? Like all of the goofy stuff. Try on the pants and the jacket and the helmet.
And then she actually gets to go, which she wants to happen because it's going to be good for the show. And then... shit hits the fan yeah i love the initial disappointment because she there's this whole conversation that she has with some of the firefighters where she's like you know like how often do you get fire calls and she's kind of saying like
I hope we get a fire call tonight. I know I'm not supposed to say that, but, you know, and they were like, well, we hope we don't, you know, and when they get the initial call, she's like, oh, is it a fire? And they said, no, this is, you know, we.
help the police. You know, we do other things. We help people who get locked out of their apartments. We do other calls that aren't just fires. And so she's kind of initially disappointed, like, oh, this isn't going to be the big exciting thing I wanted to get on camera. Just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Fun fact, if you didn't know this, that anytime you call 911 and they have to dispatch the fire department, they always send paramedics with them. So...
That's what happens in this case is that not only are the police there. Because as we find out, the situation is a little bit more complicated than originally reported. There are police there, the firefighters are there, and then those firefighters also are EMTs. So there's kind of a combination of stuff happening.
They basically are like, oh, well, this is a help call. You know, maybe we have to take her to the hospital or something because she's screaming and we're not sure what's happening. So like. Fairly common, especially for somebody who lives alone and is older. They're kind of worried, like, maybe she hurt herself or she needs help or maybe she's stuck or something. She's screaming for help.
Obviously, your everyday person doesn't have the means to be able to just like bust down a door. So this story.
also has a ton of layers where like one thing is happening and then another thing starts happening and you're like oh crap is it that oh is it this and then it's actually very different than all of those things yes it is it is all of and none of the things you thought i mean it really it's a zombie movie but sort of like incidentally i don't really think that this movie branded itself as a zombie movie so much no it didn't and yet it takes so much from george romero
I mean, it takes some from 28 Days Later, too. There are certain things that I kind of clocked. And maybe that's just because I have that movie on the brain because the... Trailer just came out for the new one. But it takes a lot, a lot from Romero. From the beginning of Dawn of the Dead, the apartment scene where the cops are going in and sort of raiding the apartment and you don't know.
Are these zombies? Are these just frightened, hysterical people? What's happening? And it's like really claustrophobic. Like there's a lot of that influence in this. There's also a lot of the original Night of the Living Dead in this, both in the... Crisis brings out xenophobia and brings out all of our prejudices. And we get to a fever pitch when you have people that are being forced to stay in one place. And of course, the little girl.
like total nod to Night of the Living Dead there, which I love because it is a nod. if you know Romero's movies, but this movie is so uniquely its own thing that it doesn't feel like a replication or even a straight up zombie movie in a traditional sense. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't aim to be a zombie movie at first. Yeah. Which it could very easily do that. It sort of like takes steps to get there.
And really, like, we don't get the quote unquote zombie aspect of it until pretty late in the movie, actually. Yeah. The old woman that they're trying to help initially, she does bite the cop and he is sick afterwards. But like. You probably would be too if you got bit in the neck. Right. By a police, you know, by an old lady.
But she doesn't look like a zombie. She looks like she's a woman in crisis. Like she's having an episode and she needs like psychiatric help. So she's just like doing this screaming thing. And as we find out later, the zombies are not like your typical zombies where like they get bit and then immediately they spring up and they're zombies for most of them. It depends on their blood type as we find out later. Yes. But they're not like...
The typical zombie where you get bit and then you immediately are like zombified and then you make all of the other zombies, which we really have to have that sort of incubation period in this movie, because if we didn't, then everybody would be zombies in like five minutes.
And then we wouldn't have a movie. Yeah, you would have no movie. Yeah. Because... it would be done or you would have to take it outside of the apartment building which would really lose kind of the magic of the movie you know rather than the infection going outward it is the sort of boiling pot of you know them being isolated in a singular space that makes this movie so compelling yeah and and like the way that the conflict moves throughout this movie is the compelling bit
Like first we have all of the neighbors sort of like upset with this old woman. And then when they realize, oh shit, this is worse than we thought. And they start to understand that they're being kept inside the building and that they're not allowed to exit and that like medicine isn't allowed to come in. Then they start to be upset at the outside and then also the police officer who's been like de facto the boss of all of the things. And then.
The police officers also become upset with the fact that they're not getting any information. And then you have the medical inspector that comes inside. Everybody focuses their ire at the medical inspector. Then the medical inspector is pissed at all of the neighbors. Because there are people upstairs, when they've been given the order that everybody needs to be in the same central location, there are people upstairs, and that creates a more dangerous situation.
Then he becomes upset at all of the people that live in this building. And then as people sort of fall by the wayside, we have different conflicts that happen. They're all sort of around Angela and Pablo. So like. Everything is happening around the two of them, obviously, because Pablo has a camera. But then they're encountering as sort of the outside is forgotten. They're encountering these other conflicts within the apartment building as in like, oh.
All of the people that we had locked up are now zombies. And now we're trying to get away from them. But now we have to go find these keys. So we have to go back downstairs and figure out where this guy lives and then go up to get that. And there's all these zombies on the way and killing all of them.
The focus never is on like one thing for too long. No, and interspersed throughout when we're in these sort of lulls between like, you know, kind of major... air quotes, antagonists, as those antagonists are kind of getting transformed into, you know, being included in the problem rather than, you know, creating, air quotes, creating the problem, we see
That kind of human nature thing, which is really what made me think of Romero's movies, where everybody's instinct is to then blame any little thing that anybody else did. And of course, this manifests. Quite often, though not exclusively in racism and xenophobia, you know, you start to see there is a family of Chinese origin who I think were meant to understand they are immigrants to Spain. And we start to see the neighbors kind of say,
Well, you know, this stereotype about, you know, Chinese folks and that stereotype and maybe they're the problem and they're always yelling. And if they were just like this and you see a conflict between. To older folks, you know, who are married, where you start to wonder, is one or both of them sort of losing some mental faculty or having some memory loss or something like that? What's going on with them? You know, so we start to see these little micro conflicts emerge in these.
seeming lulls when everyone's like, okay, like big problem has just simmered down. What do we do next? Well, there's always kind of something happening in terms of interpersonal. conflict or problems. It's so fascinating because it keeps you on your toes and interested in all of the characters as those little pieces come out. It's really genius how we're introduced to small details in the story.
So like if this is your first time watching it, you're not going to count on to exactly what's happening. Probably not, at least not at first, because. those details are introduced so slowly throughout the movie, you know, like little piece here, little piece there. Oh, here's a red herring. Maybe that has to do with it because. You're right. Like the xenophobic part is like, oh, well, Chinese people eat raw food. That's literally a quote from the movie. And they never close their door.
Yeah. Which like whatever. And they're always yelling in Chinese and her dad is sick. So it must have something to do with that. And then we learn about him and his mom has died. And so we're kind of like, oh, that's weird and auspicious. And he's sort of like... putting on a flare for the camera. And then we have, you know, the little girl who is sick, she has tonsillitis, and the dog that was there, and now he's not there for some mysterious reason.
There's more to it, though. Like, yes, we think that we have the main problem of the movie solved about 75 percent of the way through. We're like, OK, cool. So. She got something from her dog, whatever. And now she's really aggressive. And post 28 days later, we're like, oh, it's probably rabies or something like that. Like, exactly. You know, that had been introduced into the cultural milieu. So we were all like, oh, yeah, rabies.
Right. It's some sort of human rabies that she's got. And now she's passing it to everybody else and it's lethal, blah, blah, blah. No, that's not the end of it. And if you've seen Quarantine, this is where these two movies wildly diverge. And the original Spanish filmmakers were pretty pissed that the American filmmakers cut this out of the movie. Yeah. Toward the end of the movie.
We go up to the penthouse, the penthouse that has been shut up for a while. And, you know, it's owned by some guy, but he's never here and it stays pretty sealed up. I think we're expecting like rich person penthouse, but maybe something's amiss. Oh. It is like full on red string layer. Hell yeah. You know, like weird stuff on the walls. Your classic combination crucifixes and news articles everywhere.
So we're like, okay, what's going on here? We also, just prior to this, have kind of come to understand but are still a little confused about Jennifer, the little girl in the building. turns violent. She is infected. She runs off. But then there is another little girl, we think, and it happens pretty fast. So you're kind of left wondering, like,
Wait, was that Jennifer? No, I think that's another little girl. What's kind of going on here? So we get up to the lair and we come to understand that there was a... Portuguese girl who was possessed, the Vatican was looking into this, doing the whole exorcism investigation thing, and she kind of vanished mysteriously per these news articles. Oh, just kidding. She was locked up in the penthouse in this building with some sort of agent of Catholicism who was trying to diagnose slash cure her.
of the possession, which may be Satan, but may be a disease. And it all went to hell. Yeah. And thus, somehow, Satan religious... demon disease situation is what has infected this building yeah it's like in the recording that they listen to he's like talking about how he was trying to synthesize this enzyme
And it started to work, but then it's not working anymore. And so he has to seal off the whole thing in the assumption that she'll die. And the dog must have gotten... up there somehow yeah and become infected and then it of course is transmitted via saliva you know ergo all of the zombie movies ever blood or saliva you know So that's how it's been passing from dog to child, child to...
perhaps dog to old lady maybe old lady to possess girl we don't know yeah yeah we're not sure about the chain and it's not necessarily important i think it's a bummer that the american version cut that out I kind of know why they would have because it seems like in American filmmaking we want...
We want our horror buckets to be very clear. Like we want a possession, a religious possession film to be a religious possession film. And we want a zombie movie to be a zombie movie. Yeah. Especially in the era that this was made. ne'er shall the twain meet right um we're a little more nuanced now but i kind of love the combination like it's giving resident evil 4 to me you know like is it
science and disease? Is it religion? Is it both? Is it both? Why not both? Yeah, why not both? Yeah, in the American version, it's a Armageddon virus, like somebody breaks into a military installation. And there's some sort of like military, like Armageddon virus thing. And that's what they get infected with. And that's what they're spreading. That's a very post 9-11 American anthraxy fear kind of thing.
True. And also we get that in 28 weeks later, too, which is a little bit more, I would say, Americanified than the OG 28 days later. So Spain is a far more Catholic country than we are. Primary religion there, obviously, is Christianity, but Catholicism is like very, very, very deeply rooted in Spain. Not so much here. Yeah.
So perhaps that's part of it that they were like, well, we could do the Catholic thing, but like how many people would be able to relate to that? I don't know. Maybe that was like part of the reason why they decided to like. move it away from religion. This was definitely in terms of American cinema.
before the renaissance of catholic-based possession movies like that would happen a few years later because now like oh my god there were like five this year alone yeah um of varying degrees of quality right i think we kind of weren't doing the Catholic exorcism possession thing in American movies at that time. So it does kind of make sense why they wouldn't have gone there. But it is disappointing because I think it's...
a fun part of this movie. It's a fun sort of swerve where you're like, okay, it's rabies. This sucks. And you're like, wait, what actually is happening here? It's Satan rabies. Yeah. Devil rabies. Devil rabies. I don't think that he actually ever calls it anything aside from the enzyme, but yeah, it's devil rabies. Yeah, it's God. I don't know. I like a movie where you think you have everything figured out. And then in the last couple minutes of the movie, they pile on another layer of.
Totally plausible, like not I wouldn't say that this is sort of a cop out. I hate that sort of a thing where they're like, it was all a dream, you know. I think everybody kind of eye rolls at the dream, you know, trope now. But yeah, in this case, it like is totally plausible. And some of the other little like breadcrumbs that they sprinkle throughout the movie, like saying things like.
what about the Portuguese girl? And everybody's just like, kind of glosses over that. There's a reason why they gloss over that. There's a more imminent danger of literal zombies trying to bite their face off. Yes. But it kind of connects all of those like sort of loose ends. So this is such a tight story. It's so good. It is. And it's filmed wonderfully. Yeah. You know, the filmmakers did say.
that they were really inspired by TV broadcasts. And I really appreciated their commitment to that in terms of style, like in shooting style, like even subtle things like... the way the handheld camera was being held and carried, the way the zooms were handled, I was like, oh yeah, they really paid attention to TV broadcasts. There's this beautiful sequence where... It's in one of the lulls. They have the sort of two bodies that have been bitten.
and are maybe dead, maybe not. And they're trying to tend to them. And Angelica is talking to some people. And they kind of go back and forth between her interviews and the cameraman filming. And I was like, this is b-roll like they're shooting this just like television b-roll like the choice of shots i'm like
That's what a TV camera person would do. Like they would focus in on like a tight shot on hands doing action. Okay, now we're going to go to a shot with your eyewitness and they're framed just so like. Their commitment to that filmmaking is beautiful. Not committing to that is one of the critiques I have of a lot of movies. Like when they say like, oh, like this is a found footage or this is like a...
TV show kind of a thing. And they don't fully commit to that. Like, I know that doesn't bother everybody, but it takes me out of the movie. There's a modern movie that did that that I love except for that. So I just really, really appreciate the camera work in this movie. Well, it makes sense because Pablo, who played the cameraman, also was the DP and is a cinematographer. Well, there you go. IRL. So that's why he's so good at it. Yeah. He does a lot of horror movies now. And he did that.
30 coins show for hbo oh yeah yeah so he's the cinematographer for that so it makes sense that he's so good at that because he's a dp he's like he's a photographer he's a cinematographer so we can attribute some of the success of this movie to him. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Especially if he was like the only one role in the cam, because that would be a lot of work. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. However, they filmed that, whether it was.
just him as the singular camera person, or they had a crew of camera people that were taking on those handheld responsibilities. The organization of that, however they chose to pull that off, it really, really worked.
Oh, definitely. Definitely a part of my critique of the American version of this is that the camera work, while good, was not... as good or as impactful because part of the panic and like dread that you find in this movie is specifically in the camera work yes like absolutely it's not shaky cam all the time
You know, it's not a Cloverfield situation where you're like getting motion sickness from it. But there are instances where Pablo is like attacked and kind of has to roll with it or the camera gets hit or knocked out of his hand or what have you. and you have to kind of roll with it and it makes sense it's not just like shaky blurry shit and then like okay let's refocus it's like
Oh, this dude actually looks like he's fighting for his life with a camera in his hand. Yeah. And also they're reliant upon the light after the lights go out in this building. They're reliant upon the camera light, upon the spot in order to continue to be able to see in this building. And that's really cool, too. Yeah, I think this works really well in contrast to something like a Cloverfield because they were intentional to say this character is a trained camera person. Yeah.
You know, as opposed to a Cloverfield, let's tell Blair Witch because they're supposed to be film students, but where you just have like somebody. Filming on a handheld at a party and the action of the film ensues. So, yeah, you would expect it to be a less trained, a less steady hand. With Pablo, you have somebody that when he is able to.
can maintain a very steady shot can you know walk with a camera or move with a camera and keep a relatively steady shot it's when he's in crisis under duress that we see that we get that shakier cam and it makes sense for the character and it i think works better for an audience member too because you're not just being rattled all the time yeah
I read that this movie actually didn't build any sets. It only filmed in real places. Oh, that's awesome. So like the fire station is a real fire station. The apartment building is not only a real apartment building, but like. people will go and provide tributes in front of this apartment building that people actually still live in because they appreciate this movie so much. That's great. So that's really cool.
I find this fact so fascinating. Not a single one of the actors in this movie had the entirety of the script before they started filming. So every single day they were going in not sure what their fates were going to be. I love that.
And that's so cool. Like they were they were stressed out. They didn't know what was going to happen next. Like, am I going to be the one that gets bit today? Am I going to be the one that gets trapped with a bunch of zombies today? And nobody knew. So they were all kind of like, you know, keyed up. And a little anxious when they went into filming that day.
I just love that. I love that nobody got all of the pieces together. Also, when Manu falls from the staircase, which happens pretty early in the film, nobody knew that was going to happen. Oh, that's great. So like this body falling down the staircase.
All of them like screaming and freaking out is them really screaming and freaking out because they didn't know that that was going to happen right then. That's wonderful because one of the things that sticks out to me about this movie is the acting is the fact that like. Sometimes when you have these situations where you have kind of different levels of characters, but a finite number of characters in an enclosed space.
And you're building that tension. You have like a couple of the outliers that we don't spend as much time to that just become these like sort of like archetypal hysterical people. And I really felt like the acting in this movie didn't do that. Like they felt like genuinely. tense and scared and concerned. So I'm sure some of the way they handled the script contributed to that. Yeah, like you mentioned the old couple earlier, they really did seem like
Not actors. Right. Like truly concerned neighbors who are like, hey, what the hell's going on? Yeah. And I appreciated that quite a bit because it would be very easy for them to have people who like oversold it, you know? Absolutely. And I think that the English language version kind of falls victim to that a little bit. It's like too hammy. Uh-huh. And this might just be me. So like...
Take this with a grain of salt. But Greg German plays Lawrence, who's one of the neighbors in the English language version. Oh, yeah. And he hams it way too much. I don't know if that's just something that he does. That's like how he acts. But it took me out of it in the English language version. This is going to sound so weird, but I think you'll know what I mean. I love a film where rather than noticing that someone is acting.
I am appreciating how well they're acting because I'm not actively noticing their acting. And I know that feels like very circular logic. But no. Yeah, I totally get it. Especially in a found footage movie. Yeah. You don't want people to be like.
cornball-y you know yeah because it takes you out of the whole conceit of the film right exactly like we know that this isn't real life we know because Angela has been in other things right and you know these actors have obviously gone on and they're alive but We want to feel like that. We want to feel like there is a crisis happening and not just like people are trying to act on camera, you know. Exactly. Also.
One of the things I appreciated the most about this movie is that Manuela Velasco, who plays the Angela... is so punk rock through this movie. Oh, yeah. When she's like screaming like, we have to film all of this because we owe it to the people who are watching. And also, this is bullshit, you know? Yeah. Jennifer Carpenter plays this character in the English language version.
I don't like Jennifer Carpenter. I don't like her. I didn't like her in Dexter. She was absolutely the worst bit of Dexter. The behind the scenes stuff of Anthony C. Hall? Is that his name? I get him and Anthony Michael Hall messed up all the time. i don't remember which one is which dexter guy the guy who played dexter so the guy who plays dexter cheats in irl cheats on his wife gets with jennifer carpenter yeah
They keep it a secret forever. Then he decides to have an affair, apparently, with Julia Stiles when she's on Dexter. They have a terrible falling out, he and Jennifer Carpenter do, and make... everybody's life a living hell for the end of Dexter because they're so awful to work with. So outside of that,
I don't think she's a very good actor. I hated her as Deb on Dexter. I don't like her in the like, I like the premise of quarantine. And obviously, I love this movie. But I do not like her. And I don't think that she plays punk rock, you know. underground nighttime tv journalist well at all as where manuela velasco is awesome like she fully feels like punk rock and like authoritative and like no
She's screaming. She's reporting on stuff. She's like, I got to get these people the facts because this is bullshit that this is happening. you know screaming in the face of authority like no you will not stop me from from recording this everybody needs to know yeah and i appreciated that very much yeah which you don't expect because at the beginning you think like she's kind of a goofball she is kind of
of goofy yeah she's kind of goofy she's doing the thing you would expect you know from a person who does tv news or she's like worried about her hair and this that and the other but she really is like a badass yeah She turns into, like, this really...
badass like true journalist like punk rock journalist where she's like film everything don't stop the camera rolling we have to document all this which is true because otherwise in this world how would we ever have known what happened if she didn't record everything so if she listened to the cops and turned off her camera you know we wouldn't have learned all of the things that we learned so I
I appreciated that bit so much. And you're right. She's like at the beginning worried about her hair and like, oh, I said the wrong thing. We have to do another take. Can you see my hand? Is it weird? Yeah. And then she turns into this like.
guerrilla journalist and it's great. I liked that so much. Yeah, I agree. The gore is very good in this movie. It is. It is. And with the way that it's shot, they were able to... show you the good parts and really mask anything that they couldn't do yeah you know there were a couple of kills
that I clocked where they were very deliberate about the camera angle or what was happening with the camera. And that's great. That's good filmmaking. Like if you can't pull it off, figure out a way to shoot around it. And they do that beautifully. Yeah, and this isn't like a big budget zombie movie where they're showing like guts being pulled out and stuff. This is like, oh, they've been bitten on their face or their neck. And they do a really good job with those like bites.
but they also don't do... Like the thing where the people are deteriorating, really. Right. You know, they have some like gray makeup happening, but it's not like they're showing you every single phase of, you know, the cop turning into a zombie. Right. Yeah. It's just mostly like. bite and then triage of this bite and then some like needle stuff you know injecting and taking samples and stuff which is very very good yeah I agree it didn't make you feel like they were hiding it either
No, definitely not. Also want to give Javier Botet his flowers because he plays... the quote-unquote Portuguese girl at the end. That's Javier Botet, and he has come to be known as sort of this incredible character actor. Because of his physicality, he was in... uh mama guillermo da torres mama yeah very very good in that and he's gone on to do a bunch of other stuff too in fact i think at least one of the alien movies he was in that he's gone on to do a whole bunch of stuff and this is
It's not necessarily a small role for him because it's impactful. And this is kind of like the thing that he does is, you know, do movies like this. But it's I love it. I just love. Javier Botet so much oh yeah yeah well I mean to do that kind of creature acting that he and other people like Andy Serkis are known for, that takes incredible skill. Like not every actor can do that. So when you have somebody who can pull it off so well and can work with.
suits and makeup and prosthetics and through movement, you know, typically without dialogue, without, you know. facial expression you know unencumbered facial expression they can convey so much through their acting like that is a skill oh yeah and like sit in a chair for 12 hours getting makeup applied to you for a shot that's going to take all of three minutes and then
be like, all right, cool. See y'all later. You know, that's a wrap. Yeah, I totally undersold it. He was been in a lot of like English language stuff, too. He was an alien covenant. He was the hobo in it. in the first movie yeah okay he was in another movie that we did his house he played the witch from his house okay the conjuring he was in the conjuring 2 oh is he the um
The Crooked Man? Yeah. That makes sense. He was in Slender Man. He was in Crimson Peak because he's in a lot of Guillermo del Toro movies. So yeah, I totally undersold it. And that's on me because... I knew that he had done so many things and I didn't mean to like leave out all of this really cool stuff that he's done, but like he does an amazing job. This is one of his not it's not his first role, but it's one of his first roles ever, which is really cool.
So like his first credited acting appearance was in 2005, if that shows you, if that tells you anything. He was in a couple of like a handful of things. And then Wreck was like, I would say probably his first real big role. So I love him and I'm so glad that he is in so many things because he's just so fantastic.
So next time, if you have listened to this show, you know that at the end of the year, we do our best of 2024 or best of the year, I guess. But it'll be best of 2024, obviously, for this year. So that will be coming up next to wrap out the year. And yeah, we'll talk about our top 10. Yeah. Listen in as we attempt to make a list. Thanks for listening to Attack of the Final Girls. Find us online at attackofthefinalgirls.com. and hear bonus episodes at patreon.com slash attack of the final girls.
We're Attack of the Final Girls on Instagram and TikTok. Our theme music is by House Coast and is available on Rad Girlfriend Records. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode. And rate and review on Apple Podcasts so more... I'm Juliet. And I'm Teresa. Until next time, stay scary.