Directed by: John GulagerStarring: Diane Goldner, Jenny Wade, Carl Anthony Payne II, Tom Gulager, Hanna Putnam
Other Actors of Note: Clu Gulager, Martin Klebba
Plot: HA!
While Horror is easily the genre with the most traumatic tone and stories there's still a certain safety to horror films that we know in some way shape or form things will be okay. Occasionally a film comes along and challenges that like "The Mist" and "Cannibal Holocaust" that takes what we've known to be rules and throws all that out the window.
And then there's "Feast".
A 2005 movie by John Gulager, "Feast" was all the bad taste and gore of Peter Jackson's early films with about half the quality and humor. It was a movie that was pretty decent but fell flat when it came to being what it wanted to be.
Now comes "Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds", unlike its predeccesor, this sequel actually does have something resembling a plot: Biker Queen (Diane Goldner), the sister of Harley Mom from the first film (also played by Goldner), stumbles on the bar and finds out her sister got exploded in the last movie.
She kidnaps The Bartender ("Return of the Living Dead's" Clu Gulager) who apparently didn't die of a heart attack last time and goes to kill Bozo, Hot Wheels, and Tuffy who are responsible for her sister's death (it doesn't matter who plays them, they don't appear in this movie)
So they go to the town near the bar and happen upon Slasher (Carl Anthony Payne II), Greg (Tom Gulager), and Secrets (Hanna Putnam), as well as two midget wrestlers Thunder (Martin Klebba) and Lightning (Juan Longoria Garcia) who try and break into the only secure building in town: The Jail. Unfortunately the jail is occupied by Hobo (I can't find a credit for this guy, so i don't fucking know) who doesn't want company.
Good acting isn't really important here so I'm going to go solidly on entertainment value here.
Jenny Wade returns as Honey Pie (the chick who drove away in the beer truck toward the climax of the first movie) she keeps getting put out like she's supposed to be the lead of the movie and I really have no clue why. Honestly I was just waiting for her death but it never came, though watchign Clu Gulager beat the everloving shit out of her (and I'm talking like "They Live" levels of ass kicking here, he bites off her fucking ear!) is quite satisfying. I can only hope she bites it next time around.
Diane Goldner gets a much bigger role this time around. Biker Queen is apparently much better built for the task at hand than Harley Mom was. She's your typical stonefaced angry lesbian biker type person. Her and her gang of tattooed cannon fodder sidekicks don't do much more than look intimidating and shoot things but it works.
Martin Klebba and Juan Longoria Garcia are your typical "OMG MIDGETS LOLZ" characters but they manage to make it seem less gimmicky than it should be. Their small stature isn't brought up as much as you would think and the characters are actually both quite well-done for what any other movie would have as bit-parts.
Hanna Putnam plays Secrets, a character who apparently read the book "The Secret." She's pretty much a bit-part and serves about as much of a purpose as Grandma did in the first one. She's almost as annoying as Honey Pie.
Tom Gulager plays Greg, he's a ne'er do well, and he has a moustache. That's all you need to know about him. Greg just keeps fucking up time, one of the more memorable times being during the obligatory autopsy scene where every character present except him and Slasher get covered with either shit, vomit, blood, or monster semen and we never learn a single thing about the monsters except not to poke their organs and they have a big creepy eye in their chest cavity for no apparent reason.
Carl Anthony Payne II is fucking magnificent as Slasher. A double dealing car salesman with a gold tooth who keeps trying to dispatch Greg because his wife (Secrets) is cheating on him with Greg. He doesn't sound that entertaining but he truly is, eventually devising a plan to launch Thunder and Lightning onto the jail roof using a catapult powered by a motorcycle engine and testing it using the wrestlers' grandmother who has been mostly decayed by monster puke (just like the Beer Guy in the first movie) which features the line "Nope, too heavy, we need to lose some Grandma" also his introduction features the line "Suck a dick, motherfucker! I slash prices!"
But of all the characters, hands down the best is Clu Gulager in his return as The Bartender. Anyone who's seen "Return of the Living Dead" knows that Clu went to waste in the first film, not having many lines or things to keep him busy. This time around Clu has plenty to do and the aformentioned Honey Pie beatdown is one of the more entertaining gags in the film. Hoepfully he'll have an even bigger roel in the 3rd film but the ending is rather ambigious.
The effects in this movie are sub-par. Remember how in my Jack Brooks review I said that the conventional effects looked much more polished than the cheap CGI used by the rest of the Dimension Extreme titles? Well this is the perfect example of the bad CG I was talking about.
Most of this film is shot on green screen and it shows. Everything looks fake and digitized and it kind of hurts the feel of the movie. No less I guess you can only expect so much from a film of this calibur.
John Gulager has prides himself in doing the exact opposite of what we as viewers would expect. Plot? "Fuck that?" Character development? "That's for fags!" The autopsy scene is the perfect example of this, in any other movie the autopsy scene gives us some sort of information on the monster, we learn things about what they are, what they're made of, and how they work. In this case, everybody just gets covered in some kind of projectile goo and we walk away knowing even less than when we started.
The problem is after a while the breaking away from expectations becomes predictable. We as the audience know when things aren't going to work out, it becomes painfully obvious. The movie seems to know this and tries to make up for it with bad taste gags. While the cat rape and puker gags manager to be mildly entertaining many of them are just stupid and one particularly gag involving a baby just goes a bit too far.
Another problem is with the cinematography. The text profiles of the characters have been dropped this time around and replaced with the characters giving their own profile. It seems less entertaining and more unneccesary.
This time aroudn Gulager opted to do all sorts of tricky lenses and transitions like night vision, black-and-white, and slow-mo shots that make some gags just go on for far longer than they should (especially the aformentioned baby gag which seems to last 20 fucking minutes.)
It's ultimately better than its predecessor in just about every way but "Feast II" is still a long way from being a good movie. It does a lot of things right but it also does a lot of things wrong that other movies like "Dead-Alive/Braindead" and "Re-Animator" did so much better.
I give "Feast II: Sloppy Seconds" a 3 out of 5. It's entertaining but your life isn't going to be any emptier for not having seen it.
No comments:
Post a Comment