DVD review: REC 2

A special force team enters a quarantined building overran by the undead.

Another interesting Spanish horror, this is the follow up to the very interesting 2007 hit “REC”. As in his predecessor the gimmick is found footage Blair Witch style combined with zombie mayhem so we see everything trough the cameras mounted on the special operations operatives or other similar tools.

As it is bound to happen in zombie movies the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, in particular the “heroes” make a lot of very questionable, borderline suicidal decisions, but this is part of the trappings of the genre so we shouldn’t complain. The hordes of the undead shouldn’t pose that much of a trouble for a fully armed team but of course if we do it realistically we wouldn’t have a film at all so it’s better not to pay to much attention to it.

Smartly the Spanish duo behind the serie, Jaume Balaguero  and Paco Plaza, knowing that it’s pointless to try a straight repeat of the slow revelations of the first one, switch gears and deliver something more akin to Resident Evil (the game not the movies). A couple of interesting revelations make the prospect of the third movie actually appealing.

The various character are the usual cardboard figures so common in these type of movies, it’s very hard to empathize with them, it’s actually hard to distinguish them at all, but this is not such a bad problem considering that this is a horror movie, of the gory kind, and so they are there only to be dismembered in various way for our amusement.

This is still a visceral experience, in many ways even more so than the first one but were the first one made us actually care about the events here is all about the body count and the scares.