Starring Jonathan Mellor, Óscar Sanchez Zafra, Ariel Casas, Alejandro Casaseca, Pablo Rosso, Pep Molina, Andrea Ros, Àlex Batllori, Pau Poch, Juli Fábregas, Ferran Terraza, Manuela Velasco
Directed by Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza
Expectations: Moderately high. [REC] was the shit, but I don’t see how a sequel could work.
[REC] was fucking awesome. It was one of the best horror films of the modern era, without question. The ending of the film is perfect and so it’s only natural to approach the sequel with a lot of apprehension. There’s no way they could recapture the terror and the tension of the first film, as the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Directors Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza do their best though and the resulting film’s success depends on a couple of factors.
Did you enjoy and crave more of the religious supernatural elements hinted at towards the end of [REC]? If you just answered yes, then [REC] 2 is up your alley. This is The Exorcist through the shaky-cam lenses of [REC], which isn’t an entirely bad idea, but it negates the whole zombie movie thing [REC] had going on and that is bad. It’s an interesting idea to marry the demonic possession genre with the zombie genre and I think if they kept their focus on this aspect throughout the entire movie, I could have been OK with it. I’d just divorce myself from the notion that this was a sequel to [REC] and have a good time.