Though I remember being fairly impressed with Feast as far as freshman efforts go (especially ones brought about as a result of the long since defunct "Project: Greenlight"), I also remember it garnering little more than a "pretty good" out of me once it was over. It wasn't one of those "Wow! That's was pretty fucking good!" pretty goods either, but a "Meh. It was pretty good. At least it wasn't shit." pretty good instead. Again though, it was a first time project for not only director John Gulager, but also for writers Pat Melton and Mark Dunstan. As such, it was pretty good for a virgin birth. Better than that other virgin birth anyway. Whether you liked it or hated it, Dimension has brought back Feast to us under their burgeoning "EXTREME" line-up with not just one sequel, but two. Yep, Feast III was apparently shot back-to-back with Sloppy Seconds, so I'm sure we can expect to see that claw its way from the cinematic womb sometime soon too... unless whatever happened to Bride of the Head of the Family is contagious and Feast III befalls the same fate, never to see the light of day until 10 years later when its executive producer finally puts together enough money to finish it... or at least threaten to finish it. I'll believe it when it's on my shelf between Bride of Frankenstein and Bride of Re-Animator, Chuck...

Anyway, Gulager, Melton and Dunstan are back, as it should be with any sequel. But, will they run their second race as well as their first? Perhaps they'll even improve their performance? Then again, maybe they'll crash and burn miserably? Will it be a memorable stop in Gulager's travels? Will Melton be wishing he was the incredible meltin' man by the end of the final reel? Will Dunstan check in? Yeah, you caught me. This entire paragraph was thrown together because I couldn't resist the uncanny supernatural tug-o-war of my soul to make a Dunstan Checks In joke. It is the fire hydrant on which I cannot help but tinkle.

First of all, a little disclaimer for those who have yet to see Feast. In order to review Sloppy Seconds, I'm going to need to make a few references to said movie. If you're one of those purist types who doesn't want anything spoiled for you, then reconsider reading the rest of this review. I repeat (for those who are hard of hearing reading): unlike too many other sequels, Feast II is impacted DIRECTLY by it predecessor, so if you want to remain ignorant to everything that happens in Feast until you get around to watching it yourself, STOP READING THIS REVIEW. Got it? Good. Now, for the rest of us...

We pick up immediately following the events of our first "feast". Boomstick wielding blond bimbo Honey Pie has survived the night of horrors after abandoning the rest of the bar patrons to save her own ass. As for her would-be boyfriend Bozo, he drives off into the sunset in his Trans Am, a.k.a. The A-Hole Mobile, never to be seen again for the next 90 minutes with the exception of a brief flashback. Obviously Balthazar Getty wasn't too big on reprising his role. While HP heads off to a probable destiny of being eaten by coyotes and radioactive scorpions, a familiar looking dyke on a bike named Biker Queen pulls her hog into the parking lot of our last movie's bar & grill locale. Turns out she's the twin sister of the previous movie's biker bitch Harley Mom who, as you'll no doubt remember, got half her leg cut off and suffered a mouthful of monster spunk before being turned into a suicide bomb booby trap for the bad things. Unhappy with finding her dead sibling's blown off hand being carried around by a dog, she finds what's left of the Bartender (still John Gulager's daddy Clu) and forces him to tell her what happened under threat of melting his face on her tailpipe. Speaking pretty well for an old man whose throat was ripped open a few hours earlier, he gives up Bozo as her sister's exploder. With a hankerin' for shithead meat, BQ hops her Harley and heads for the nearest town, which is actually called "Smalltown". Stupid or funny, it's in the eye of the beholder. Not one to leave a geezer in a neckerchief dying in the desert sun (besides, we need somebody to make the funny observational comments), she pistol whips the old fart and straps him to her sissy bar. Reminds me of the old days with my ex-wife Switchblade and having nothing to look at but her “If you can read this, the bitch fell off” shirt for hours at a time... which, too many times, many a passing motorist could read just fine. I still can't walk in a straight line after that trip to Montreal.

From here we relocate to a few miles away and 16 hours earlier, where we're introduced to Thunder and Lightning, a midget wrestling team (and co-owners of a key grinding store) who have their own run-in with the enigmatic beasts that look like the product of werewolves raping Tasmanian Devils, then getting skinned alive and being set on fire. While Lightning has a penis that could be classified as a third leg (phallus phobics beware!), Thunder's played by Martin Klebba, who most will remember as the midget in the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, while too few will recognize him as Hank Dingo: Knee High P.I.... not to be confused with Inch High Private Eye, who in turn is not to be confused with Teeny Little Super Guy... now that I've alienated everyone in our viewing audience under the age of 30, allow me to continue. While the tag team is dodging desert demons like the beasties were King Kong Bundy on a bender (heh heh, "Little Beaver"), our next new victim-to-be is a promising science student-turned-meth dealing vagabond named Hobo. We meet him while he sits rotting in jail under the stone cold eyes of the local sheriff who likes to treat drug dealing dirtbags like 'Bo to the tried and true Guantanamo Bay method of incarceration. The fact that 'Bo hasn't been allowed to shower in almost a week will probably work in his favor, provided the over-sized Chupacabras have functional sinuses. He proves that sometimes being in a jail cell is good for you, especially when the world outside those bars is suddenly turned into a blood orgy and the walls are painted with entrails.

Our next new friend is used car salesman Slasher, named so because of his tendency to "slash" prices on the jalopies on his lot. Remember Carl Payne? His name may not be familiar, but fans of the "Cosby Show" (there I go dating myself again...) will recognize the face, cuz Carl played Theo's long time buddy Cockroach. Yep, it's Cockroach!... and from the looks of him, he's one roach that's been well fed in the years since his time in the Huxtable household. He could probably kill Kenan Thompson and take his place on "Saturday Night Live" and nobody would notice. Slasher's not alone on this shortcut to an early grave though, because his wife Secrets is there too, so named because she's one of those loony bin escapees who prescribes to that new wave "power of wishful thinking" bullshit detailed in the book "The Secret". You know that if Oprah Winfrey buys into something, it's GOTTA be legitimate, right? Like that unlicensed plastic surgeon she had on her show who eventually killed Kanye West's mom... and had anal sex with her corpse on the operating table... allegedly. Then there's Greg Swank (John Gulager's brother Tom), who works for Slasher and works on Secrets. He's a hustler and self-described ne'er-do-well who likes to laud his spiffy white trash mustache. If he really loved it though, he'd do like I did and get himself a whole wardrobe's worth of "Mustache Rides $5" t-shirts. No, I suspect he only grows his mustache to distract from his rapidly deteriorating hairline.

Getting back to where we left off before our new cast introductions had to be made, Biker Queen has gathered her lady biker subjects "The Bleeders" (though "The Fodders" would probably be better fitting) to hunt for Bozo. When they get to Smalltown, they find the streets peppered with abandoned cars and bloody bodies, eventually hooking up with the rest of the cast and doing the survivor thing in an abandoned metal shop. When Bartender gets his hands on Honey Pie though, he goes all Ike Turner on her ass for leaving him and the others at the bar with their pants around their ankles at the end of the first movie! Hopefully watching Clu Gulager bash a woman's head against a toilet 20 or 30 times before elbow smashing her in the face, MIKE TYSONING HER EAR OFF, and tackling her out of a second story window will be as disturbing an act of domestic violence as I need to sit through for the next 40 years. Yikes. Never leave an 80 year old ex-Marine for dead, no matter how much he may be dressed like a register jockey at Roy Rogers.

When the group hooks up with Thunder and Lightning (and their grandma), Thunder tells of a military convoy that's supposed to be passing through the area and picking up survivors. Apparently this pest problem is a full scale national emergency invasion and they've got about 15 hours to hold out until they can start reaping the benefits of their tax dollars at work. Can they survive 15 hours in an abandoned metal shop with nothing to do but play poker with nudie cards though? More importantly, can we survive watching them sit around and do nothing but play poker with nudie cards? Well, fortunately we don't have to because, as you can probably imagine, the proverbial shit does a suicide dive plancha reverse moonsault headfirst into a huge industrial fan... or it does in the last 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately, those 15 minutes seem to be in an effort to make up for the haphazard back-and-forth between our two main parties of interest that dominates much of the movie's midriff and includes an autopsy scene that, though grotesquely entertaining in its own right, seems to go on forever.

One of the things the flick suffers from is, for a sequel that shows promise of expanding itself from the original whose entire story took place in the confines of a bar, Sloppy Seconds pigeon holes itself into almost exactly the same situation when it has an entire playground it could've explored instead. Rather than spread the action throughout Smalltown like 30 Days of Night, it starts out promisingly enough (especially given some beautiful "big country" style establishing shots by Gulager early in the going) only to stick everybody into a confined place like every other movie and let 'em sit there to be picked off like the last group of survivors. There are two big changes in Feast II though, but they're not good ones...

A good part of the latter half of the movie is done up with green screen and the cheapest computer effects money can buy, so if you were expecting the traditional squibs and corn syrup given to us in the first one, be warned. I'm assuming there was only one, maybe two monster suits too, since there are a couple of really bad scenes where digital copies of the creatures are super-imposed over footage of the town. I'm almost hoping they were done intentionally bad too, since the color correction was pretty much nil. As for number two (and yes, it lives up to its billing), unlike the memorable "snapshot profiles" that introduced us to our characters in the original, Sloppy Seconds opts instead for brief "interview" clip from everyone. They suck. They stall the movie in comparison to the snapshots, and the "life expectancy" part is more fun when it's on the screen rather than listening to the characters themselves basically tell us whether they're going to live or die. Doesn't that kinda ruin the point of them being in the movie? I mean, it's hard to suspend disbelief when you've got your characters themselves acknowledging that they're in a movie. Blah. Lesson learned? If you do something your audience loved the first time, KEEP IT! Why do you think people still eat Kentucky Fried Beakless Mutant Bird Creatures? BECAUSE THE SPICES DON'T CHANGE! Why do you think people hated "New" Coke? BECAUSE THEY CHANGED THE FORMULA! If doggie style makes your partner purr, don't fuck things up in mid-stream by telling her to switch to a reverse cowboy! For fuck's sake kids, finding something that works in today's market is like finding a slot machine with a glitch that makes it jackpot out on every tenth pull. You don't leave it alone and move on to the craps table, YOU KEEP PLAYING THE DAMN SLOT MACHINE!

Something that not only survives the original movie but ramps up exponentially is that this is very much a dirty, mean spirited, gross-out flick. For starters, every other word includes "fuck" in some fashion, whether it be used on its own or attached to words like "mother". Each one of the characters is a selfish ass ready to drop any one of the folks around them if it'll buy them another 5 minutes of screen time. Survival of the fittest? Sure. Survival of the assholes? Indubitably. As far as the gross goes, this is where the disturbed minds behind the scenes go to work. One of the monsters misunderstands the term "getting some pussy" and rapes a cat... and that may or may not be the worst thing that happens in the movie, depending on how you feel about babies... An old woman (who's already rotting like a Jack-O-Lantern three weeks after Halloween) is dismembered in the name of physics before she's splattered (still alive somehow) against a wall. One monster turns into the epicenter of the gross-out black hole, so much so you could shoot an entire Troma movie around it. First it farts. That's right, there's a monster fart. And then it vomits... like a fire hose... all over an old woman... It then projectile diarrheas all over somebody and everybody in the cast throws up... before it pisses/jizzes on EVERYBODY, causing them all to vomit again... Remind me never to show this to my grandma if I intend on staying in her will.

Still not sure if you should rent Feast II after all of that? Well, if you hated Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes, and Krista Allen, you're in luck. If you thought the first movie suffered from a decided lack of scenes where an old man brutalizes a young woman against a toilet (a "used" toilet at that), or where small animals get raped, or old women melt into primordial ooze (Paging Dr. Nelson. Paging Dr. Ted Nelson), or midget wrestlers... uhm... make keys, or people attack monsters that shed pixel blood without coming within a foot of actually being hit, then I say go for it. It should at least hold you over until Troma comes up with something nastier... provided Feast III doesn't push the envelope further... like into a safe full of dynamite and dead babies doused in gasoline and set on fire before being catapulted into the path of a speeding tanker truck full of sulfuric acid.

On a final note, for any Judah Friedlander fans out there (for whatever reason that may be...), the self-proclaimed "World Champion" makes a brief return during a trippy dream sequence. If you've ever wondered what he looks like without his trademark trucker hat and glasses (or a shirt...), well, watch Feast II and you'll know... or just check out the appropriate screen shot below. As for me, I'm out like sauerkraut. Aufweidersen!