3 out of 5

Director: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza

Blah blah blah zombies.  I do think that Rec helped to bring the intensity back to POV flicks, eschewing normal plot dynamics of build and release for just building and then letting the other shoe drop endlessly at some point for the remaining runtime.  It was a novel experience, and has turned out to be satisfying beyond a first view thanks to the way it uses its format to leap over some plot holes.  But where do you go from there?  And directors Balaguero and Plaza do the logical thing of upping it all a notch – adding more cameras (which ends up being pointless except it allows some cameras to get destroyed), adding more on-screen violence, adding more to the plot.  And the ridiculousness threatens to sink the film at a certain point, as yet another clueless person hesitates to kill a screaming, bloody zombie and a teenager is yelling “keep filming” and let’s freak out and get angry at each other.  The big point of contention between the American version and the original series – biological vs. religious – finds a nice middleground here, as they expand upon the concept to pitch the cause as, essentially, a virus still, and one that can be treated with a vaccine.  But we still go back and forth between science and faith and it almost seems like our writers want to shove that religious aspect in the American’s faces as proof of what makes their version original, and whatever.  At the point where things have really been taken as far as they can go, they pitch a GREAT concept dealing with light that really does make the last quarter of the movie unique and freaky, uncertain of where it’s going.  It fizzles out again, unable to avoid the “…so why did we do this…?” question, but it was a good distraction.  Excepting the visual overkill, the stuff captured in seemingly one-takes is very impressive.  But my bipolar take on the flick as a whole garners this an average rating.