Feast II: Sloppy Seconds   Starring: Jenny Wade, Diane Goldner, Hanna Putnam and Clu Gulager Optimum Home Entertainment RRP: £15.99? OPTD1675 Certificate: 18 Available 11 January 2010

Following on from the first film, in which four people in an middle-American backwater bar survive a horrifyingly violent attack by a family of carnivorous creatures whose sole motivation is to eat and copulate, they manage to make it to a nearby small town. Meanwhile, finding the severed hand of one of her motorcycle 'sisters', a tough gang leader chick takes a wounded man who knows more than he's telling and rides into town with three of her chapter. The town is overrun with the lighteningly quick flesh-hungry monsters, forcing an unlikely group of survivors to band together. But can they out-think creatures which never tire?

The production designer describes the vibe of this film as a cross between Kill Bill and Gilligan's Island. I'm not entirely certain that he achieved the bizarre accomplishment he was striving for. I would more succinctly describe it as a marriage between a 1950s monster movie and a 1980s video nasty. It is almost as if director John Gulager and his three generations of family actors sat down to plan and coordinate as many scenes of bad taste as they could reasonably squeeze into the running time. So we have a man throwing away a baby he has just rescued as a diversion to save his own skin. There is a midget wrestler who gets catapulted between buildings. A dog is shot at point blank range (thereby instantly loosing a family audience). We see one of the creatures force itself sexually on a domesticated cat, a group of characters get squirted with bile and sexual fluids from a dissected creature, a grandmother quickly decomposes whilst still alive - and a number of other situations which I'm sure many of the uninitiated in this genre would find sick and depraved.

Surprisingly, it works - just enough to be a minor success worthy of interest. At the beginning there is what appears to be an obvious attempt to emulate the style of Quentin Tarantino, with periodic freeze frames on individual characters with their name stamped on the screen, and a mini flashback to show how they got there. Then there are the gun-toting bare-chested women, the violence and constant bad-mouthing. The plot and location then adopts a pattern similar to that of Splinter, with a siege of sorts and very little hope of a happy outcome. I can appreciate the attempt at dark humour, but it doesn't really succeed; the closest it comes is through the ridiculousness of the characters and situations (midget wrestlers, biker chicks, a used car salesman and his adulterous wife, etc).

What really makes this film work is the attention to detail on the sex-driven creatures themselves. Take a look at the Making of Feast II featurette and I'm sure you'll chuckle at the men in padded rubber suits lumbering around and trying to look threatening. However, the green screen touching up of special effects, along with very tight editing makes all the difference. It turns what could have been a derisory movie into one of note.

7

Ty Power