FEAST II: SLOPPY SECONDS

The morning after the monsters' attack at the bar, a gang of motorcyclists arrives at the scene because Biker Queen, the leader, is looking for her twin sister. She discovers her sister's corpse and learns from the surviving bartender the end of her sister and Bozo's involvement in her death. Biker Queen, thirsty for revenge, loads the bartender onto her motorcycle and forces him to indicate Bozo's residence. The motorcyclists arrive in the town and find it abandoned, with the streets filled with corpses: the monsters, in fact, were not only those who assaulted the bar, but during the night they made a raid of humans also in the city. Since the creatures are still roaming the streets of the town, the motorcyclists join a group of survivors and seek refuge in a warehouse. The excellent low-budget splatter "Feast", cinematic debut of John Gulager and screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, had such success among horror enthusiasts that the same team, three years after the first film, decided to continue the story of the mysterious creatures hungry for flesh and sex, even creating a trilogy. Unfortunately, however, the miracle does not repeat itself and "Feast II – Sloppy Seconds" is the classic example of a qualitative decline given by the reiteration of the same idea and the arrival of the most economical home video. As in the formula of (almost) every sequel, Gulager decides to amplify the strong points of the prototype, therefore splatter, irony and bizarre situations. His taking these elements to excess, however, makes "Feast II" a saraband of oddities so exaggerated that they often tire the viewer. The narrative thickness on which the subject is built does not differ much from the first film, thus leaving the importance of the story secondary to the construction of each scene; however, "Feast" had its own compactness, "Feast II" seems more like a somewhat disorderly pamphlet of ideas aimed at surprising-disgusting the viewer without a real reason for narrative unity: everything happens, in the most paradoxical way possible, just to make the viewer say "Foooorte! What a cool thing!" The construction of tension scenes is completely abandoned in favor of a cartoonish and bizarre atmosphere, sometimes gratuitously vulgar, to the point that some situations vaguely remind a Troma-style climate, only a bit softer. Example of all, the long scene of the monster's autopsy in which from the creature's body continuously escape foul gases, liquids of dubious origin that cause collective vomiting crises and post-mortem ejaculations that flood the motorcyclists' faces with sperm. Thus, Gulager tends to concentrate the attention almost exclusively on the disgusting solutions, paradoxically decreasing even the true splatter, in fact, although the blood flows copiously, most of the gore scenes are resolved with the disemboweling by the monsters of the unfortunate one of the turn. Another great limit of "Feast II" are precisely the monstrous creatures. In the first film there was the mystery about their form and even when in the finale they were revealed, a skillful use of lights and editing made the viewer never really understand what the characters had to deal with. In this sequel, on the other hand, the monsters are always well visible, they walk around the sunny streets of the city and show all their poverty of realization, since the film has a budget even lower than the already meager one of the first film. A big mistake on Gulager's part that takes away pathos and mystery from the figure of these strange invaders of unknown origin. However, the direction remains of excellent craftsmanship, always ready for appreciable visual virtuosity and inventions, as well as the writing of the characters continues to bet on differentiation from the masses, although it must be said that the desire to emphasize the characters of strangeness in the characters takes away some effectiveness from them, unlike the perfect calibration of the previous film. Here we will have to deal with a gang of tough, heavily tattooed and supersexy motorcyclists who, without reason, at a certain point in the film until the end will find themselves acting topless; then there are two dwarf wrestler brothers, one of whom is super-endowed, with a Mexican grandmother in charge who from the middle of the film onwards will become a sort of zombie in continuous putrefaction. The circus ends with a triangle composed of a sly used car salesman, his goose and full-of-faith wife and her lover, who would be a colleague of the husband. Naturally, some characters from the previous film also return, the bartender and the "traitor" Honey Pie, always played by Clu Gulager and Jenny Wade. "Feast II – Sloppy Seconds" is therefore a strongly targeted film, unable to replicate the success of the previous film and more aimed at lovers of declared trash and trivial entertainment. You have fun and a lot, but for sure we are far from what could be defined as a good film.