[rating=4]
“Rec 2” doesn’t muck about. From the off Spanish directors Jamie Balaguero and Paco Plaza get straight down to business as they sling us into the back of a SWAT van with four heavily armed hombres just minutes after the bloody events of the original film.
“Bring everything,” growls the chief as his men bristle with shotguns, assault rifles, pistols and battering rams. You just know they’re going to need the lot before this mission is over. It’s tempting to shout, “How about bringing some more guys” as “Rec 2” gears up to throw everything in the horror arsenal at these unsuspecting bad boys.
Obligatory camera in tow, the SWAT team must baby-sit the inscrutable Dr. Owen as he searches for the source of the outbreak. Owen is as serious as cancer with a gravestone complexion to match. Is he on the up and up or is he harbouring a deadly secret that festers all the way back to the Vatican?
The stench of Catholic corruption certainly clings to every frame of “Rec 2” in the form of newspaper cuttings and blackened icons. This reflects the mounting outrage aimed at the Church and its outdated response to allegations of sexual abuse by its members and subsequent institutional cover-ups that have threatened to embroil Pope Benedict XVI in the scandal.
Such religious imagery when juxtaposed next to contemporary Spanish society is truly startling in places. Rosary beads hammered into an apartment door help wrench the film from the clutches of the zombie genre and drag “Rec 2” into the arms of demonic possession films like “The Exorcist” with some horrifically macabre plot twists.
However “Rec 2” manages to balance serious social commentary with schlock horror that would be perfectly at home in “The Evil Dead,” or even Lamberto Brava’s cult “Demon” movies (watch out for an innovative use of a firework). It also owes a huge debt to “Aliens”, but then again which film featuring heavy firepower and the supernatural doesn’t?
“Rec 2” is a visceral first-person experience – like being strapped into an “Afterburner” arcade machine and given the Ludovico Technique for 85 minutes. Only after we are thrown around blood soaked staircases, claustrophobic air ducts and pitch black laboratories do we stop and ask the logical questions with any “found footage” movie: who found the footage and who’s watching it?
Perhaps we’ll find out in the third installment.