Children with the blackest evil bubbling under their innocent little faces. Ordinary folks mutated into face-chewing berserkers by a virus from Hell. And all the carnage caught on film by an unsuspecting documentarian.
These tropes will be familiar if you've already seen the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, The Exorcist, and 28 Days (and Weeks) Later. But 2007's low-budget triumph [REC] executed its concept so well that its corpses felt fresh. Spanish directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza repeat the trick with mixed results in [REC] 2, which sends an undisciplined SWAT team and a pack of flipcam-toting brats back into the same blood-soaked Barcelona apartment building where [REC]'s outbreak started.
Using the same frenetic pacing and POV shakycam style, [REC] 2 tries to go bigger — but this time, the gimmicks can seem forced. Still, there's plenty to like, including nerve-shredding night-vision scenes, grotesque creature design, and one particularly stunning kill involving a bottle rocket.
