[Rec] 2 (2009)

[Rec] is one of my favorite zombie-style movies ever. It's a rousing, violent, original and scary horror movie made with the concept of found footage. The US remake, Quarantine is actually okey, better than it's reputation - but still, it's a total copy of the original masterpiece and gets a bit boring after a while. Finally [Rec] 2 is here and I'm happy to say that it's well worth the wait. This time we're follow a SWAT-team that are sent into the house right after the first movie ends, together with a doctor to try to find survivors. From the beginning we see everything from both a cameraman's view, he's there to document everything for research - but also from all the soldiers cameras, attached to their helmets.

Inside the house everything is to quite. The bodies are gone, and there's just one or two dead bodies to examine. But after a while they realize that the doctor isn't what he seems to be, and they discover more non-infected people hiding the the house. Both some familiar faces, and a new bunch of victims. But I don't want to reveal to much...

The only bad thing with [Rec] 2 is that the surprise-moments are gone. We know what to expect when it comes to zombie-attacks, we saw that in the first movie. But except that, this is a great horror movie which explains a lot of questions from the first movie and gives us some more to think about. In an ordinary sequel the filmmakers would have tried to make everything bigger and grander, but not here. We're still in the house, in the exact same locations with more or less the same amount of people and zombies (or are they zombies? are they even infected...), and still the production makes something new with the story.

Violence is raw and brutal, just like the first movie, no long boring shots of gore. This is fast and bloody, and if you don't like to see child-zombies get their heads blown of you shouldn't watch this movie. The effects are of course excellent, but it's the make-up effects that's really fantastic. Three zombies/infected people show their faces in longer shots, and it looks extremely creepy and weird. Almost unreal. All this violence in combination with the cramped corridors and dark apartments makes it an adrenaline-kick, and I love every minute of it.

The only thing that bothers me is the intensity, the shocks that the first movie showed us. It was all about surprise, to show us something we never seen before. I wished there was more of that stuff in the sequel, but in the end the story is fine, the acting is good, the violence is brutal and the zombies are scary. So what's there to complain about really?