[REC] 2
Directed by Jaume Balgueró & Paco Plaza
Produced by Julio Fernández
Written by Balagueró, Plaza & Manu Díez
Released by Magnet Releasing
Spanish with English subtitles
Spain. 84 min. Rated R
With Oscar Sánchez Zafra, Ariel Casas, Alejandro Casaseca, Pablo Rosso & Manuela Velasco 
 

I’m possibly too literal-minded to fully enjoy the unremarkable [REC] 2, the faux-documentary sequel to the Spanish horror smash from a couple years ago (remade here as Quarantine). A found footage flick, it never transcends the genre’s fatal flaw: the cameraman’s heroic and ridiculous commitment to videography, which is why in [REC] 2—as in most of these movies—five minutes can’t go by without someone shouting at the cameraman, “We have to film this!” “Keep filming damn you, everything must be recorded!” “They have to know!” Even terrified teenagers witnessing a man about to get his throat bitten by a demon-crazed killer zombie choose to complacently shoot the unfolding horror rather than set down the digicam for a second to, you know, pick up a nearby gun.

The plot (beginning exactly 15 minutes after the last movie ended) follows a team of SWAT officers storming a quarantined apartment complex that was the site of the zombie apocalypse from the first film. The cops are all equipped with some kind of improbable high-tech camera system. This lets us see the point of view of each cop, and it’s actually pretty effective when we see through the eyes of one ill-fated officer, who ill-advisedly decides to wiggle through a crawl space.

But the tale sputters fast. Once inside the building, the SWAT team links up with a mysterious priest on assignment from the Vatican (bear with me) who’s searching for a vial of blood from a demon-possessed girl. It seems mosquitoes carrying her blood spread the infection throughout the building, turning everyone into demon-possessed zombies, and the Vatican wants to get its hands on a sample of her blood to continue experiments (keep bearing with me) to prevent the demonic takeover of the world. Or something. Oh, and because there aren’t enough cops for zombie bait, midway through the filmmakers briefly switch perspectives to a group of teenagers whose macho brinksmanship foolishly takes them inside the building.

Filmmakers Jaume Balgueró and Paco Plaza (returning from the first [REC]) make a mistake even George A. Romero, tarnishing his reputation with each new film, avoids: they explain everything! What was merely hinted at in the first [REC]—demonic nefariousness—now becomes hilariously, stupidly, explicit. There’s even a scene where blood catches fire when a priest brings his crucifix near it, as if this were some low-rent take on The Exorcist.  (He speaks in the pseudo-religious bombastica typical of his cinematic kind.) Worse, the filmmakers “scientize” demonic possession, contagious through a viral infection, to the same ham-fisted, unintentionally ludicrous effect as when George Lucas “scientized” his own mythology in the Star Wars prequels. But the real low is when the SWAT team encounters a fallen angel that can only be seen in total darkness—with night vision cameras. (I’m pretty sure such cameras require at least some scattered photons in the background to work—but never mind.)

For a rather mainstream movie, the film achieves an almost experimental effect of not actually having a main character. Its ostensible leads, the SWAT team, are a gaggle of interchangeable hearties with stubble who shout banalities like, “Tell me all that you know, because you know more than I do!” The teenagers pass by so quickly you just register they include the requisite whiny girl.

That’s not to say the film, chugging by at an admirably tight 84 minutes, isn’t, in its own way, fun. [REC] 2 is really an experience, not a story, an unplayable and well-choreographed video game guiding the viewer through the corridors of a spooky house as gruesome creatures jump out to startle you, and ending so as to set up another completely unnecessary sequel. Brendon Nafziger
July 9, 2010