I know I may sound like the kind of guy who hates Charles Band for being a lackluster hack. The guy used to have luster, but he's since tarnished said luster with innumerable gobs of his own sperm... which he likes to call his "Band Mates". Not only has he not made any movies worth wasting the time on watching in at least a decade, but goes so far as to offend his previously loyal fans by continuing to wipe his ass with our faith in what he was capable of once upon a time in video rental stores far far away. He's long since become the George Lucas of bad movies, and I mean that in the most offensive "angry geek" way possible. But, despite my frequent words of disgust in what the guy tries to pass off as "creations" (bowel movement joke goes here) in recent years, in these trying times Band's weak ass attempts at entertainment are good for one thing. No, not kindling, as it's very hard to not only light a DVD on fire, but maintaining such a flame is beyond even Prometheus's pyro brandishing prominence. No, the current crop of Full Moon fodder are the cheapest, most reliable, and most legal way for me to fuck my anger management to the land of wind and ghosts so I can cut loose on something without actually having to literally cut anything loose from someone. Unemployment? Mounting bills? Eviction notices? Constant phone calls from collection companies? None of that matters because I've got Evil Bong 2 in my DVD player. Now, allow me my catharsis as the hate flows through me...

Oh yeah, speaking of unemployment, although I made it a point to review the first Evil Bong after ingesting a heady haze of Uncle Mark's Sticky Jersey Toxic Green, I won't be doing the same with King Bong. Sadly I'm still seeking a weekly paycheck and thus "mood enhancement" is out of the question. I don't think the drug tester's are buying the "must be secondhand smoke from my pothead grandma"excuse anymore.

For anybody who missed the first round of shenanigans (why would you watch a direct sequel if you haven't seen the movie it's sequeling first?!), you get the handy "2 minute clip show" recap in King Bong's opening, as reflected in the cheap plastic proppery of the titular antagonist Ebee. Son of a bitch! If I'd know they were gonna do this 3 years ago I never would've watched the first fucking movie to begin with! We haven't even gotten to the opening credits yet and already I call bullshit on this movie! BULLSHIT!

Remember Brett and Luann? Of course you don't. Few people wasted the time to watch Evil Bong and none of the ones who did wanted to remember anything to do with it. Except for the Jack Deth cameo... and Tommy Chong wielding a chainsaw... neither of which appear in this sequel, so there's still no reason for anyone to bother seeing it. Anyway, Brett and Luann were the young lover heroes of the first movie (I think), and they're back for Bong Dos with their brain cell smoking chums Larnell, Bachman, and Alistair. All are reprisals for their previous actors, with the exception of Alistair, who will now be played by... some nameless nobody that's not the nameless nobody who played him previously. Maybe the other guy wised up and decided Evil Bong 2 would be a detriment to his resume. Or, maybe he's just dead. Who cares. Either way, somebody thought it'd be witty to be self-referential on the change up in casting by having Larnell tell Alistair that he almost didn't recognize him... Chuckle. Snicker. Guffaw. Blart.

In the time since their supernatural head trip inside of Bong World, everybody's least favorite gaggle of college boys have been having extreme pot related symptoms. Bachman's gone narcoleptic, Larnell's hornier than a 12 year old who mistook his dad's Viagra for dollar store candies, and Brett's svelte jock figure has pulled a Marlon Brando thanks to his unstoppable munchies. As for Luann. Well, she's just a cunt. She might've been a cunt before, but I have very little recall when it comes to Evil Bong. Selective amnesia I'm sure. As for Al, he's not feeling any wonky side effects yet. But, in the interest of trying to avoid such things, he and the guys do a little background searching for any info they can on Ebee's history. In a reeeeeeeal stretch at giving Trancers 2 fans a *wink*wink*, Sonny Davis does us the favor of showing up again as the delivery guy who brought Ebee to their doorstep in the first place. His name? Rabbit. Yeah, if you don't get the joke then don't worry, cuz it's really not worth renting a copy of the second Trancers flick just to be "in" on that gag. Anyway, Rabbit and Larnell go through this tired "Who's on first?" back-and-forth before Rab bums a joint off the boys and tells them about the weird stories told to him by the woman he originally picked the blasphemous bong up from, i.e. Jimbo (Tommy Chong)'s ex-wife. Turns out the paranormal paraphernalia was a memento from the dark recesses of the Amazon during Jimbo's sixties stint with the Peace Corps. So, seeking cures for their excessive THC side effects, the kids pack up their bags and head south of the border. WAY south. And they bring Rabbit with them. Wow. So Charles Band is so desperate to bring back fans of his heyday stuff that he not only shoehorns some old Full Moon favorites (Tim Thomerson, Phil Fondacaro, and the Demonic Toys clown) into cameos for the first Evil Bong, but he goes so far as to bring back Sonny Davis to not only reprise his role as the knobby kneed old UPS guy, but makes him an integral and ongoing part of the movie... Hear that? It's the sound of the last shred of my "give a damn" falling through the hole in my pocket and disappearing from my life forever.

In South America, the group runs into an American researcher named Velicity (who was apparently in the first Evil Bong according to the IMDB, but who I can't remember having been there at all) who just happens to know a little something about the group's mysterious bong troubles in relation to a local tribe of jungle runners called the Poontang. Yes, the writer is a 5th grader and has all the subtlety of Robin Williams on PCP. They also run into Larn's curmudgeony old grandpa who just happens to be Vel's research partner, and who's also miraculously given up his wheelchair since the first movie. Good thing too, because as we all know, South America's not wheelchair accessible. Oh, and Gramps has become even more obsessed with mocking his grandson's minuscule pecker. And what are the two researching down in the Amazon? A rare species of... yes, marijuana. Turns out this rare indigenous herb is so medicinally potent that it even gave Pappy back the use of his withered old extremities. It also revives a few busted pieces of Ebee's face, which Larnell's been smuggling around in case they could turn out to be useful. Considering how paranoid Larn is, you'd think he would've dumped every last bit of that spookshow water pipe as soon as everybody started showing signs of sickness, but that'd make too much sense. "What's that doc? You say I have cancer? Yeah, I sleep with a big glowing piece of radium under my pillow every night. Why?"

I try to give movies a five year shelf life before I start throwing out spoilers, but in this case I'm just gonna sum up the rest real quick. If you've got some perverse interest in not only sitting through this bad trip but you want to be "surprised" by what happens, I advise you to jump ahead a few paragraphs ASAP while I educate the rest of the class in your absence. Okay, so it turns out that Grandpa is doing the evil Capitalist thing and looking to sell all of Vel's super weed to a dealer stateside. She finds out, does nothing, and ends of giving the geezer the pieces of Ebee's face on top of it. With Ebee's directions and some super dope, the old man puts the bong bitch back together again. Back at camp, the magic weed also cures the trio of their ailments, meaning Bachman will no longer be randomly falling down and we won't need to see Larnell poking out Fat Boy Brett's eyes with his Rod of Erection. Meanwhile, Rabbit tries to strike a shipping deal with Grandpa, but winds up kidnapped when the Poontang pop in to steal Ebee. That's right, just a little reminder: they're called the Poontang tribe. If you don't expect numerous vagina jokes to follow, you're giving this movie way too much credit. Grandpa returns to the camp to tell everyone about the Poon, and the guys go off in search of their creepy little skeev-o new best friend. Finding the natives nearby, they also run into the Poon's deity, King Bong... who's really not that impressive in the scope of notable bongs. Check any head shop in upstate New York. When you live out in the middle of nowhere, the only things to do are fuck, watch TV, and make bongs of ever expanding magnitudes. A cheesy plastic skull hookah ain't shit.

Pissed off that King has passed her by in her absence to make time with malnourished jungle skanks (cast off from the cheapest strip clubs in the poorest parts of LA of course), Ebee tells our heroes that they need to smoke from King so they can enter his inner pocket dimension (apparently all sentient bongs have their own internal pocket dimensions), destroy King's magical pimp medallion, and rescue Rabbit before he gets turned into a doobie and smoked. Why? Because EVERYBODY smokes weed! EVEN BONGS THEMSELVES! The Poons seduce the idiots (because they fell for it last time with the monster strippers inside of Ebee, so why not fall for it again?), but Larnell and Alistair free their pals, smash the medallion, and everybody wins. Larn stays behind to soak up some dope and mack Velicity's crack while the other guys return home to live their useless, boring lives the way they were before all this shit happened. Bach resumes his career as a fast food crony, Al goes back to spending his Friday nights alone surfing textbooks, and Brett straps on his jock strap to continue with that minor league baseball career of his... and goes back to breeding a new race of super pubic lice with his shallow dick-smoking girlfriend. Rabbit becomes a spliff lovin' preacher and I lose another 80 minutes of my life to another cinematic polyp dug from Charles Band's colon. I've seen so much of that man's shit that I should be his fucking proctologist at this point. At least then he would be the one paying me to look at it.

There's really no reason to like this movie. At this point, stoners have seen enough better movies that it takes more than just watching morons toking joints to qualify as entertainment. I never understood the mentality of "We're smoking weed! The people on TV are smoking weed! This is fucking HILARIOUS!", but if that's really all it takes to keep anybody out there interested, it's for those remaining few that King Bong exists. You can't even pass it off as a horror movie, because any attempt at actual evil hinted at in the title was dropped to make room for a straight forward "comedy". Maybe the direct-to-DVD comedy audience is easier to please than the direct-to-DVD horror audience? Who knows.

Amidst the myriad reasons not to like this movie, one of my favorites is Ebee's stereotype "black ghetto momma" voice. Let's check the time line: she lived in the South American jungles until the '60s, when she was taken to the states by Jimbo. Shortly after she was locked away in his attic after causing the deaths of a number of Jimbo's friends, where she stayed until Jimbo's ex-wife cleaned the place out and sold off all of his possessions sometime around 2006. This landed Ebee in the trashed apartment of our four idiot white guys, where she was eventually blown up by Jimbo. Now, unless she had a TV in that attic and spent a lot of her time watching UPN or BET, how the fuck did she turn into a lower class urban caricature?! And on top of that, King Bong has never even left the jungle, yet he's got the same cheesy bootleg ghetto bullshit hood rat mouth too?! He even has cheap bling, a leopard print collar, and a pimp hat! You think that just because your movie is directed at retarded stoners who look at anything with a pot leaf on it as automatic comedy genius that it gives you license to be a stupid lazy fuck, "August White"?! How dare you exploit the chemically altered of America, you wanna-be Alan Smithee! Getting started on the ethnicity of the Poontang tribe would just make my brain eat itself alive, so forgive me if I don't attempt it. Let's just suffice it to say that one of them is blond...

There in one sliver of good in this pile of used needles though: some of the cast. Larnell I actually like. There's something about the way what's-his-name plays the character with this surreal balance between the strung out conspiracy theorist and the laid back dirtbag stoner that's almost hypnotic. Like Shannon Dougherty's crooked eyes. The second is Velicity. Despite the name, Amy Paffrath's a 10 on the "cute, but in the hot way" scale and she plays Vel with an endearing charm that's also hypnotic. Like Shannon Dougherty's crooked eyes... if I wanted to fuck them. Aside from his obsession with his grandson's schlong, Larnell's grandpa is good for a few laughs. Rabbit's okay in small doses, but he wears out his welcome quickly when he's being crammed down our throats like so much of our Aunt Marge's okra casserole surprise. Bachman, meanwhile, is still doing the retarded pothead surfer guy Spicolli wanna-be deal and it's as gnarly as ever... in its propensity to make you want to throw empty whiskey bottles at your TV. Brett's still a douche bag jock, no surprise, but his fat guy makeup isn't so bad. It would've been better if they could've actually matched the skin tones though. As is, he looks like he wears a turtleneck around half his face when he's out in the sun. Trust me, the turtleneck is no friend to the fat man. I know. It always feels like I'm being strangled by a really weak person. R.I.P. Mitch Hedberg.

I'd like to take a quick time out to address Amy Paffrath directly if she's reading this: stop doing Charles Band movies! Evil Bong flicks are not going to give you any kind of gateway into stardom, as insignificant as they were for Demi Moore with Parasite or Helen Hunt with Trancers. Full Moon no longer has the support of a big Tinseltown production company like Paramount behind it! Get out while you still can! OH GOD! NO! HE'S GOT A GUN! RUN AMY! RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!

Evil Bong was a stupid idea with just enough novelty to almost warrant a movie. King Bong is the very definition of a sequel that no one asked for. The production costs would've been better spent on something useful, like feeding starving kids with distended bellies in Africa, or making a Terence Trent D'Arby music video... and I hate Terence Trent D'Arby. I'll use your wishing well as an outhouse you bastard! Anyway, you're better off packing your Cthulhu bubbler and watching Blood Freak again and leaving King Bong for the next poor nimrod at Blockbuster to regret renting.