Sunday, November 9, 2008

Second Helpings: Feast 2 - Sloppy Seconds(2008)

Whenever I feel like I'm in a rut or just feeling generally "blah" I always reach for a giant monster movie or Godzilla film on DVD to cheer myself up. When giant monsters don't work I resort to Plan B: horror movies, more specifically gory and violent films that provide a jolt to my visual cortex. One such movie I recently bought on DVD jolted me out of the temporary doldrums just fine, thank you very much. I'm referring to Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds(2008). This film is a direct sequel to 2006's Feast, a movie directed by John Gulager(son of character actor Clu Gulager), which features an isolated and remote diner in the middle of nowhere that is suddenly attacked by marauding and grotesque looking humanoid monsters. In Feast 2, also directed by John Gulager, things pick up right where the first film left off: another group of people hole up in a nearby small town, trying to survive the monster's attacks on them. The group consists of a black used car salesman, a gang of tattooed and well armed female bikers, a pair of Mexican midget wrestlers, and finally "The Bartender"(played by Clu Gulager) and "Honey Pie"(played by Jenny Wade), both survivors from the first film.

Like the first installment Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds is a meat grinder, perhaps even gorier than its predecessor. There are arguably as many shots of human innards, including brains, intestines and other internal organs in this film as there are in surgical training videos. There is also one particularly nasty scene that is so disgusting, involving a dead monster carcass, that many in the group of survivors upchuck in a group vomit fest. Add to the mix a death by a pair of hammers, one especially gruesome impaling scene and a sequence in which one of the monsters fornicates with a cat . Starting to get the picture here? There is, predictably, a great deal of profanity spoken by the characters in this film, ironically most of it not prompted by their dire predicaments, courtesy of the hostile and bloodthirsty monsters that are after them, but rather because of their own disdain for each other. Humor creeps into this film, to be sure, though I did not find this movie to be nearly as humorous as it's been described in other reviews.

If you're like me, a great fan of violent and gory horror films, then I would definitely recommend this film as a DVD buy. A release of a third "Feast" film is forthcoming in the first quarter of 2009.

The trailer for Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds: