Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (DVD)
Reviewed by Nomad
Starring Jenny Wade, Clu Gulager, Diane Goldner, Martin Klebba, Hanna Putnam
Directed by John Gulager
Released by Dimension Extreme
Blood? Check. Guts? Check. Boobs? Check … Check … Check … Check. Little-people wrestlers battling ravenous monsters with extra large … umm … junk? Check … with one hand over my eyes.
Just as Saw dishes out the catch phrases, the newest franchise on the block could say, “If it’s bloodthirsty, humping man beasts … it must be Feast!”
When we last left the bar in the middle of nowhere, there was barely a character left with an ass cheek intact. Nevertheless, some did survive and scattered to the winds. Now a new but familiar face has come to get a little payback, and her arrival throws some of the last battle’s fighters back into the ring for round two! The setting is a small no-name town, again in the middle of nowhere, and they won’t know what hit them. As we begin to meet the residents, chaos rolls in at breakneck speed and the body parts fly.
The cast of characters dodging claws this time consists of an all-girl biker gang named (with an ironic double meaning) The Bleeders, two little-people wrestlers and their grandmother, a used car salesman, his cheating girlfriend and the guy she was screwing, and the super-powered Clu Gulager. Honey Pie is also back, but after her exit from the first film, she’s not very welcome in the crew, and after a confrontation she spends the rest of the film waging her own war … mostly against gravity. Now with the players in place, most of whom aren’t the most redeemable people, all that’s left is to send them running. What happens next plays like something written by Quentin Tarantino juiced on enough heroin to kill a grizzly. There’s little people nudity, animal sodomy, naked tattooed women, acid puke, a monster autopsy, and more. Seriously, if that isn’t enough to make you want to see this, you are on the wrong site.
Tying all this mayhem together is a healthy dose of fantastically bad taste. I say “fantastically” because I’m a big fan of the over-the-top, expertly executed B-movie; and Feast II delivers this in spades. This isn’t a stereotypical American action movie where everything falls into place for the hero. Point of fact, almost nothing works out for our band of future meat. Feast II, much like the original, becomes an exercise in waiting to see who is going to bite it next (no pun intended) and how gruesome that end will be. The characters are introduced in quick and dirty montages of their life, revealing nothing about the order in which they might be torn to shreds. That’s left to your imagination, but I personally dare you to try and calculate who dies and when. Feast II does not conform to any typical horror rhythms, leaving it highly unpredictable. I must also mention that this film is incredibly SICK with enough vomit gags and mysterious liquids to qualify it as particularly nauseating fetish porn. It’s is an answer to “What if John Waters made a horror movie?” and a love letter to Lolyd Kaufman. Funny, gory, inappropriate, and wildly fun!
Being nitpicky may sway your opinion back and forth from positive to pass. On one hand, the acting performances are top notch, especially considering the budget. This is an amazing example of not needing boatloads of cash to attract real talent. Never was there a second I didn’t believe someone in this movie, as ridiculous as the subject material may be. Tom Gulager plays Greg, mustache aficionado and despicable human being with flashes of hero he’s trying to work out of his system, a performance which will garner equal parts pity and hysterical laughter from the audience. Martin Klebba as Thunder practically demands your attention, ever with his Luchedore brother Lightning at his side, projecting strength and intensity and dripping with spite in the face of a foe he has no business snarling at. This is the role Pirates of the Caribbean never provided!
Cinematically, it’s truly great to see a movie shot with an original thought. Scenes are always made more interesting with dramatic angles, tricks of lighting, and a touch of the artistic, which definitely works in this film. It all comes together as if striving to be the third installment of the Grindhouse feature film.
Toward the negative degree, Feast II was pulled off on a relatively low budget (though I know people that would kill for a couple million), and it shows at times. The monsters, while decent enough, don’t hold up extremely well in the stark light of day, under which they spend a great deal of time. If getting a little Toxic Avenger during the street scenes is the only major flaw of this film, it’s practically a plus for some of you reading this. Green screen scenes are painfully obvious, begging the question why they bothered with them at all. There’s also a little matter of continuity as characters are covered in goop one second and relatively clean the second. This doesn’t hurt the scene, but it is something that always bugs me when I see it, yanking me out of the moment.
Since I’m pulling double duty, I must mention the DVD extras included. The making-of featurette, while fun, fails to seriously capture the sense of family shared by the cast (in more than just a Gulager reunion) that is so obvious as you watch. This is a great bunch of people with a superior collective sense of humor, making me want to prod the BTS filmer until he shows me the funny. Not much going on there!
This realization is made more real upon listening to the audio commentary from director John Gulager, the writers, and select cast who rib each other, point out their own flaws, and generally prove my point.
Also on tap is a feature called “Meet the Gulagers”, profiling three generations of the filmmaking family and all the madness within and without. This is highly enjoyable to watch, albeit a quickie.
Insanely hot women with guns, badass wrestling little people, and more gore per square inch than in the entirety of most horror films make Feast II: Sloppy Seconds a must buy any day of the week. Celebrate originality in a horror film! Celebrate a filmmaker taking chances with his subject material! Most importantly, celebrate the terror that comes along with a giant cock on an unstoppable killing machine. So wrong. Do you shield your eyes or dodge those eviscerating claws? Either way, you are the FEAST!
Special Features
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4 out of 5
Special Features
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3 out of 5
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