We'll start this off with a review of Feast II: Sloppy Seconds from two years ago. Since there are already reviews up for Feast and Feast III: The Happy Finish, it makes sense to include the middle chapter. I'll be back after the classic review with some further thoughts...
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The Cap'n is happy to report that Feast II: Sloppy Seconds is as watchable as the first Feast. This means many of you won't be watching the film, but for the three or four of you who enjoyed the first film, you'll find plenty to dig into in the sequel.
For me, Feast was possibly the best thing to happen to Project Greenlight, the otherwise terrible show that gave us garbage like Stolen Summer and The Battle of Shaker Heights. Season three of Greenlight (which happened to be the last season) followed the trials and tribulations of a first time director who was making a monster movie on the Weinstein Brothers dime.
It looked like it was going to be awful from the show, but when Bob and Harvey left Miramax, they only took a few movies with them to their new company. Feast was one of them, and it turned out to be a breath of fresh air in the sea of shitty remakes (along with Universal's Slither). Feast was nonstop in bringing the gore, killing any character who stood still for too long, and violating all of the rules of the horror genre. When we watched it during the first Horror Fest, I was quite impressed. So when the sequel hit dvd this week, I picked it right up, expecting more gory fun.Feast II is however a different kind of movie. Director John Gulager, along with screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan are more interested in moving the story, which means much of of the relentlessness of the first film is gone. The looser pace does allow Gulager to build tension in different ways, but mostly it allows the film to explore... different ways of subverting the horror genre.
One of the first things you'll notice is that not every character who died in Feast is still dead. Some of the people we assumed are dead aren't, some of them got away, and at least one has an identical twin sister that's also a biker. The first half of the film is about the absence of the three survivors of Feast, particularly since said twin sister wants Bozo (Balthazar Getty) dead in a bad way. But things don't stay that way for long.
That town the Bartender (Clu Gulager) mentioned in the first film also got a serious monster attack, and just like in Feast only the morons survived. Accordingly, we get philandering car salesmen, new age idiot wives, and meth heads running loose when our heroes arrive.
Speaking of which, here's the first point at which you can see Gulager expanding his palette of horror targets: he includes serious "geek favorite" types like midget luchadores and an all-girl biker crew into this mix of walking targets, and before long Honey Pie (Jenny Wade) the coward / smartest character from Feast shows up. The monsters are, of course, everywhere, just as hungry and horny, and it turns out, packing a surprise.
Without spoiling too much more, I will say that while Sloppy Seconds is not like Feast in many regards, it may take the willingness to be gory and disgusting to new levels in this film. There's a dissection scene that goes very, very wrong, culminating in a scene that somehow manages to top what happens to Judah Friedlander in the first movie. Really. That story arc ends with the sentence "pour some of grandma out."
But that's not all; Feast II has monster bestiality, truly gratuitous nudity, impalements, eviscerations, the mother of all stupid ideas involving a catapult, more monster jizz, and a truly bizarre dream sequence. I was wondering exactly how the clearly dead Friedlander character could possibly come back, but Gulager found a way, and I guarantee you won't forget it. And as usual, the film is truly cavalier in its willingness to kill anyone and everyone at any time.
Which brings me to the final taboo. Feast II breaks the one rule you don't break in horror movies. The one thing even The Hills Have Eyes wouldn't do. And as disturbing as it should be, Gulager turns it into a moment of truly twisted black comedy.
Don't turn it off when the credits start, because as usual there's a slight twist in what we're being presented. Considering that the ending is vague enough to suggest more survivors plus the fact that four of the people who clearly lived through the first film aren't in Sloppy Seconds, don't be surprised if they show up in Feast 3: The Happy Finish. It's in post-production now, and I wouldn't put it past Gulager to be fibbing about the cast, especially considering that Getty and Krista Allen were involved with the sequels at some point. ---
Feast II: Sloppy Seconds thoughts from 2010: I'm not really sure that I'm that fond of the Feast sequels in the wake of The Happy Finish, as it appears that Dunstan, Melton, and Gulager didn't really have three films mapped out in any capacity (the "giant robot" finish to Feast III was essentially a cop out to avoid actually finishing the film) and a great deal of the anarchic joy from the first film doesn't carry over to the sequels. Instead they rely on shock value and gross-out effects, which while amusing don't really hold up on second viewing.
The other problem is that when you watch the three of them back to back, things really fall apart about halfway through Sloppy Seconds and never recover. In retrospect, I think that recommending the sequels only to people who liked Feast was the right call, but I'm not convinced that I demonstrated the film's weaknesses as well as I did with Feast III.
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