Feast II

Feast II (2008) is a great example of the fine line between a smart and funny tongue-in-cheek genre homage, and a gratuitous, indulgent, stupid piece of crap. The original Feast (2005) was smart, funny, tightly scripted, and actually somewhat frightening. It was a pretty damn good mix of creature horror, action, and comedy. The sequel isn't even worthy to wipe my ass. Which is disconcerting, since both movies have the same director, principal writers, and even a few holdover actors. Feast II's inferior creature design, effects, and cinematography could possibly be attributed to changes at those crew positions, but this film is bad all around, including some pretty abysmal writing and direction.

Feast II picks up where Feast leaves off. In the original, a group of (intentional) horror archetype characters are holed up in a bar in the middle of nowhere, fighting desperately to stay alive against a horde of mysterious and blood-thirsty creatures roaming the desert outside. The sequel picks up the morning after the epic standoff, as the few survivors try to warn a nearby town of the impending creature doom. Added to the mix are a gang of biker chicks looking to avenge the death of one of their sisters, used as a sacrifice to the creatures the night before. Oh yeah, and there's a couple of Mexican wrestler midget brothers. Yeah, exactly. WTF?

The characters from Feast were subtle stereotypes of common horror tropes. The parody was very toned-down and was actually a loving homage to the cheesy horror films of our youth. The sequel's characters are boring, unfunny, ridiculous caricatures, limited not just to horror archetypes, but to pretty much any kind of person the writers wanted to make fun of. Seriously. The addition of the midget wrestlers and the slutty lesbian bikers pushes this into the realm of stupidity and serves no purpose other than some cheap physical gags. I mean, come on! Midget wrestling? And not one, but two characters who have no lines and whose entire purpose for being in the film is so that they will eventually get naked by some convoluted plot trick? It's fucking ludicrous!

Moving along to the effects. If you have a subpar effects team (which Feast II clearly does), why on earth would you set half of your movie in a place that necessitates a shitty-looking greenscreen effect? And honestly, we need to take a step back here. It's just a rooftop, for godsakes!! The real question is, why the hell didn't they just film it on an actual rooftop? Is that so hard? Wouldn't it have been cheaper than doing half the movie in greenscreen?

And any coolness the creature and death effects may have had are totally obliterated by some atrocious pacing. My god, I felt like I was gonna fall asleep ten times just waiting for something, anything to get accomplished in the film. For example, there is an entire 20 minute segment on an impromptu "dissection" of one of the creatures. And by dissection, I mean one guy cuts it open and then pokes and prods various organs. Each time he pokes or prods, some noxious gas or disgusting fluid comes flying out of the creature's corpse (including an uncomfortably long segment wherein the corpse spews urine, semen, and god knows what else out of its ludicrously long penis). It was all blatantly gratuitous, disgusting, and played like a dick & fart joke.

It's obvious that the effects people were just creaming themselves with anticipation to show off their cool creations, so they linger on everything way too long, which any idiot knows only serves to diminish the power of the effect. Fucking amateurs. The monsters in the original were never fully shown, they were mysterious, amorphous, and fairly scary. The monsters in Feast II..... well, they pretty much just look like a bunch of guys running around in cheesy rubber monster suits.

God, I'm getting tired just trying to chronicle the horrendousness of this piece of shit. I don't even feel like getting into the acting, which was also really terrible. Suffice it to say, nobody's winning any Oscars here.

Storyline & plot: 2/10
Cinematography & effects: 2/10
Music & mood: 4/10
Performances: 2/10

The Reverend says: 2/10