__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

Feast & Feast II: Sloppy Seconds

The first Feast movie was a bit of an oddity. Winner of the TV contest Project Greenlight (which involved exec producers Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Wes Craven), it was a fast, furious and funny flick about a group of losers hanging around a roadside tavern in the middle of nowhere. Along comes a hero to save the day. He has no sooner explained the danger facing everyone in the bar when he is horribly killed by the monsters chasing him.

Next in is his girlfriend. She says pretty much the same thing, but she’s got just a slight edge on her former beau and manages not to die in the first third of the movie. From then on, anything goes.

The style of the movie is… stylish. Each character is introduced with a comic-book freeze frame and a quick calculation of their odds of lasting to the end of the movie. Best part of this set-up is that it’s not necessarily correct. Taking a cue from the first Alien movie, no hero manages to live up to the title.

Don’t step on that, Johnson

The monsters are a small family of hideous carnivores. They are clever, relentless, voracious and large, though their offspring — created through frantic copulation and delivered fast and very, very ugly — are simply voracious. The creature’s sex life is explored in some detail, mostly because a door is slammed on the male monster’s genitalia and his junk is snipped off. That gives the filmmakers a chance to be super-disgusting with the still-active gonads.

The gore continues till the end of the movie when the cast has been thinned to a mere couple of survivors. The big names in the first Feast movie back in 2005 — Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat — have been killed off, but there is enough of the cast left at the end for a significant sequel, aptly titled Feast II: Sloppy Seconds.

Gruesome laughs

Feast II stars Clu Gulager and his son Tom, Diane Ayala Goldner and the lovely Jenny Wade. These leftovers from the first Feast are easy appetizers for the same monsters, though the creatures don’t seem anywhere near as large or in charge as they had been. In any case, the slaughter is more or less repeated in a slightly different setting.

The sequel is not as funny nor as fast-paced as the original. It’s also not as original as the original. It does mimic the first flick’s sense of comedy, so if you enjoyed the gruesome laughs during Feast’s blood-letting, then you’ll get a kick out of Feast II.

The best things about the first two Feast movies are the small but meaty roles played by comedian Josh Friedlander (30 Rock) and professional yapper Henry Rollins. Both these guys are hilarious and worth the price of a rental for the first one. The venerable Clu Gulager makes both movies fun to watch. Your Humble Reviewer has been a fan since the guy was in Return of the Living Dead.

The first Feast is better than the second, but together they make a fun double-creature-feature. Expect a review of Feast III: The Happy Finish soon./JE

Feast DVD extras: Director’s commentary, making-of minidoc, etc.

out of a possible five skulls.

Feast II DVD extras: Same.

out of a possible five skulls.

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

Grace

This seems to be a horror film made by men to terrify women. The subject involves a fetus dying in the womb and the rather disgusting possibilities of mother love bringing the stillborn infant back from the dark side of the river Styx.

The story unfolds as Madeline, played by Jordan Ladd (A Perfect Getaway), is being impregnated by her husband. I won’t bother mentioning the cypher who plays the husband because he snuffs it early in the picture when the not-so-happily married couple has a car accident. It’s this wreck that kills both hubby and baby, leaving Madeline just a bit mental. She insists that since she has just three weeks left to the birthdate, she’ll keep the little corpse inside herself till it’s time to deliver.

Happy birthday!

The due-date arrives and Maddy is in the care of her midwife, a sincere but homeopathic nut played very well by Samantha Ferris. Amid a considerable flow of blood and mucus, the dead baby is delivered. Madeline clutches the baby to her breast, sweet-talking to it as the rest of the women leave the room. When the midwife returns, intent on talking sense to the distraught would-be mom, she finds mother and child perfectly content. Against all odds, the baby is alive.

Alive is a relative term in these movies, of course, and the child turns out to have a hunger for more than breast milk. Madeline tries her best to suckle the demon tot through a bleeding nipple, but some kids are simply more difficult and it doesn’t take long before mom is anemic and a fresh supply of baby’s special formula is needed.

Change that baby immediately

Grace is better acted than most horror movies. Your Humble Reviewer doesn’t mean that as an insult to other horror movies, merely a statement of fact. If a horror movie has lots of violence and action, it doesn’t necessarily need good acting. Grace is a comparatively quiet movie, so the acting matters more.

Ladd as mother Madeline is fine. Gabrielle Rose, playing the mother-in-law from Hell, is also good — meaning she is hideous. Malcolm Stewart as a slightly corrupt but well-meaning obstetrician is also very good and he probably doesn’t deserve the fate meted out to him in this low-budget flick.

Grace is a pretty nasty movie and Your Humble Reviewer found some scenes a little hard to handle. This is no small potatoes, considering that YHR has enjoyed scenes of men being gutted and chewed by soft-shelled demonic aliens in the past. There is something in Grace that is primal, that nips painfully at our soft underbelly. A monstrous newborn seems, somehow, far more awful than an adult monster./JE

DVD extras: Commentary with director and others, several minidocs on aspects of Grace.

out of a possible five skulls.

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

No more Horrorscopes

Yes, as sad and difficult as this may be for his many fans, supporters and ardent True Believers to learn, this is the absolutely final and last Horrorscope by Mr. Mark
Elf to appear on the Horror Movie Show website this year.

http://www.hmpod.com/horrorscopes-by-mark-elf/

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

Santa says: “The ho-ho-horror…”

As the Horror Movie Show‘s special Christmas gift to all our listeners, please try to enjoy this special podcast. Mark & Jerry’s heads are filled with visions of murder-fueled Santa impersonators, killer elves and stockings hung with great care (because they are full of poisonous snakes). Don’t forget: he knows if you’ve been naughty and doesn’t care who’s been nice. Enjoy the holiday season, dear listeners!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!

 

Dread

Based on a story by British horror maven Clive Barker, Dread is about a group of university students who decide to make a film focused on the innermost fears of their fellow pupils. Quaid, played by Shaun Evans, comes up with the idea and pushes his new friend Stephen (Jackson Rathbone) to help with the movie. Needing a film editor for the project, Steve brings his friend Cheryl (Hanne Steen) into the mix.

Stephen has another gal-pal at the campus library where they both work. Abby (Laura Donnelly) is a sweet young woman, half her face obscured with an almost-black birthmark. The birthmark covers most of the right side of her body and she is very self-conscious of her overabundance of melanin.

Flyers are put up around the campus and soon the trio of filmmakers are interviewing students and hearing the usual load of neuroses and phobias: spiders and darkness and other commonplace fears.

Axe and ye shall receive

This isn’t good enough for Quaid who admits in a touching moment that as a wee child he saw his parents axed to death. The memory of the Axe Man (Carl McCrystal) has haunted Quaid all his life, but the young fellow decides — rashly, I’d suggest — to throw away all the medications that have been keeping his mind on an even keel. This is the exact point when events begin to go a tad askew.

Abby asks Stephen to interview her and she reveals how her birthmark has defined her and robbed her of a normal life. She manages to get through the days, but her veneer of confidence is thinner than the dark skin on her body. The video Stephen takes of Abby removing her clothes to reveal her entire dreaded fear is later used by Quaid to push the poor girl right off the edge of her mental cliff.

Cheryl, too, has her secret terror, her own ever-present dread. When she was a child, her father would return from his job at the slaughterhouse and sexually abuse her. Because of the lasting stench of her father’s vicious touch, Cheryl cannot stomach even the smell of meat “Doomed forever,” she says, “to take iron pills” as she lives a vegetarian life. This will also be used by the psychotic Quaid when he pushes the student film to madly disgusting lows.

Clive tortures sadism

It takes a while before we understand just how disturbed the Quaid character is and by then, of course, it’s too late. By the end of the movie, it seems that being a strong person who works hard to overcome some trauma of childhood isn’t enough, at least not in the nasty world of sadists, about which producer Clive Barker loves to tell.

Your Humble Reviewer thought Barker proved his nastiness way back with those ghastly Hellraiser movies. Those flicks seemed not just to admit sadism existed, but to revel in it, glorify it, celebrate it. Yay for inflicting physical misery! Go-o-o-o pain!

Dread continues in this super-dark vein. This movie smugly smears its amorality on the walls of the torture chambers, the message written in clotted blood.

There is no redemption, only the bigger sadist, the stronger psychotic still standing at the end. Not much of a moral lesson for the youngsters, I’m afraid./JE

DVD extras: Cast & crew interviews, behind-the-scenes doc.

out of a possible five skulls.

__________________________

Limited Time Offer - Get Your First 3 Months at Audible.com for $7.49/month!