Directed By Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza
Starring Óscar Zafra, Jonathan Mellor and Alejandro Casaseca
(Note: This review contains minor spoilers, though nothing you won’t learn 5-10 minutes into the film.)
It’s not hard to see why the cinéma vérité “mockumentary”/”found footage” approach has proven so popular and effective in horror in the past decade. Sure, it’s a polarising sub-genre – just as many people despise The Blair Witch Project, for example, as adore it – but when done right, it’s a simple, high-concept way to breathe new life into tired genre conventions, whether it be haunted house films (Paranormal Activity), Godzilla-esque kaiju movies (Cloverfield), or the humble zombie film ([REC]). But while their 21st Century presentation certainly gives a new and shiny looking glass through which to view an old genre, that’s not why they work; the ultimate strength of cinéma vérité horror is in its distinctly old-school sensibilities.
Films like Paranormal Activity unmistakably have more in common with Val Lewton’s work than the abundance of CG-filled horror and gory “torture porn” films hitting multiplexes in the past few years, favouring slow-burn tension over jump-scares and embracing the notion that what we don’t see is infinitely more terrifying than anything cooked up on a Hollywood hard drive, scaring us with suggestive restraint and our own imagination rather than overblown gore scenes and exposition. The slow burn of these films and the introduction to characters in the midst of mundane, everyday lives grounds the film in some semblance of realism and allows us to get to know them before things go awry, giving the film a chance to nurture a cast that feel realistic, if not likeable.
[REC] 2 takes all those principles, beats them with a shovel and tosses them down the nearest manhole. Picking up at the end of the original film, the sequel follows an elite team of armed police as they escort a CDC scientist into the virus-plagued, zombie-ridden apartment building to look for survivors while documenting and containing the outbreak. When their CDC specialist reveals himself to be a crucifix-wielding priest sanctioned by the Vatican to collect a blood sample from ungodly beastmonster Niña Medeiros to stop a demonic apocalypse, things quickly take a turn for the unconscionably stupid.
It’s commendable that Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza decided to take the sequel in a new direction and try something different, but unfortunately, the detour into all-out supernatural territory takes the tense, original, fright-filled groundwork laid out by its predecessor and simply lays on hokey, laughable and tired conventions we’ve seen dozens of times in bottom-shelf ’80s horror trash. Not content to just rip off The Exorcist, [REC] 2 also borrows liberally from Alien and its genre-jumping sequel to uninteresting effect, often going to profoundly dumb lengths simply to force a stolen set piece on us (a potentially tense scene cribbed from Alien is rendered laughably retarded, as a marine scurries through an air duct system to find a conveniently-placed refrigerator. In an air duct. Since labyrinthine vents are where we all stash our chilled beverages).
What’s worse is that even with a new sub-genre spin on their own burgeoning franchise, Balaguero and Plaza still manage to rehash much of their original film; early encounters with the infected play out almost exactly as they did in [REC], and quickly become repetitive and tiresome, while we get another 3rd act visit to that creepy penthouse with a daft, forced excuse to have the whole scene lit in night vision again. While early on it seems like, despite the sheer daftness of the newfangled plot, that the director duo might stick to the credo that made the first film so effective – showcasing simple, taut, suggestive scares – as our first, quick, subtle glimpse at something scuttling across a ceiling is joltingly unsettling. But the pair quickly drown out any tension and unsettling originality with over-exposed hokeyness and muddled, forced exposition.
While the original gave us an immensely likeable lead in Manuela Velasco and a cast of diverse characters to be fodder for a zombie-chomping, in [REC] 2, we get a small platoon of SWAT cops who, as if a generic military grunt caricature was jammed into a Xerox and copied a few times, are almost entirely indistinguishable from each other in appearance and personality (or lack thereof). Dumped right into the fray with them, we’re never given the chance to get to know them, while Balaguero and Plaza neglect to include anything resembling character throughout the film. To make matters worse, much of the film is viewed through split-screen in-camera helmets (a device that’s distractingly overused throughout the film whilst never used to any worthwhile effect), so our bland protagonists are faceless for much of the runtime, leaving it hard to tell who’s being reduced to páté by zombie hordes and even tougher to care. While the macho marine clones are bland to the point of being forgettable, resident priest Father Exposition is aggressively insufferable, existing only to spout jumbled plot filler and provide a strained, lazy and incomprehensible excuse to keep the leads confined in the building. A detour to follow the footage of a group of unbearable screeching teens only adds to the problems, as it serves nothing, goes nowhere, and takes up time that would’ve been better spent fleshing out the leads.
Cinéma vérité mockumentary horror is a decade past the point of being able to successfully pass itself off as genuine footage, but the heightened reality of it still helps foster a sense of believability, and sitting down to watch an all-too-plausible series of terrifying events is always a sure-fire way to inspire fear and dread. But with the runtime of [REC] 2 devoted to daft, over-the-top antics and exposition that feel like a straight-faced remake of Leslie Nielsen’s Repossessed, plausibility takes a walk to Finland, and without it the “found footage” conceit is rendered more of a burden than a worthwhile narrative tool, especially since Balaguero and Plaza never find any new or original use for it.
An early tense scene or two aside, there’s not much to recommend [REC] 2 to those who loved the taut, unsettling, high-tension scares of the original. Shocks that were intense and terrifying in their sparse use the first time around are rehashed, overused and overexposed to the point of dilution and boredom here, while plot points that were already perfectly handled with ambiguous subtlety in 5 minutes of its predecessor are stretched to an entire movie of unbearable exposition-filled stupidity. Unfortunately [REC] 2 is yet another addition to the pile of unnecessary, awful sequels.
Rating:
[REC] 2 hits UK cinemas on 28th May 2010 and US theatres in early July.