The “found footage” horror is a film executive’s dream: produced on a shoe string with a deliberate lack of studio polish, star power or special effects, they have the potential to make an astronomical amount of profit. This combination of the mundane and the supernatural is also proving a hit with audiences.

2007’s [REC] was a master class in the sub-genre but unfortunately, [REC] 2 only succeeds in demonstrating that in a genre that lives or dies on the element of surprise, sequels are rarely a good idea.

[REC] 2 begins fifteen minutes from where the first film left off: our news-anchor heroine has been dragged away into the dark by a monstrous figure and the apartment building is still under quarantine, teeming with the infected. We join a group of heavily armed SWAT-like police officers tasked with entering the apartment block to search for survivors and a cure for the contagion.

Herein lies the fatal flaw of [REC] 2 (one that also defeated the sequel to Neil Marshall’s superb The Descent); once the setting and enemy become familiar, they completely lose their capacity to terrify. To their credit, returning directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza have attempted to tackle this problem with the addition of extra firepower and a more traditional horror plot. Unfortunately, in doing so, they have only managed to kill the documentary realism that made the first film so effective.

The addition of more firepower may have worked for James Cameron in his sequel to Alien (a film that is quoted by [REC] 2 in an air shaft sequence) but here it only serves to eliminate the sense of danger. It is telling that rather than unloading a shotgun round, the group more often than not try to subdue their crazed attackers mano a mano. This incompetence is distracting to say the least.

The biggest misstep though is the clumsy exposition. Though the final scenes of the first film hinted that the outbreak had its source in religion, it essentially ended without closure and was all the more unsettling for it. Now stretched over an hour and a half, the demonic possession storyline seems hopelessly kitsch rather than blood-curdling. Instead of adding context and depth, this sub-Exorcist storyline only serves to bring some unintentional comedy to proceedings; not least thanks to the gun-toting priest, Dr. Owen. The late addition of a trio of teenagers with yet another camera only serves to highlight the mess that Balaguero and Plaza have gotten themselves into.

A hugely disappointing effort only compounded by the news that [REC]3 has already been announced.