One of the last collectors edition DVDs I ever bought was Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. I’m not a guy who cares about movie packaging beyond the initial reaction of, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.” After all, the box is just going to end up stuffed in a drawer with the wrong disc in it anyway. Even so, that DVD came in a beautiful tin box full of goodies like lobby cards which I promptly lost. I kind of regret selling it even though the 4K UHD I’m reviewing today clearly looks superior and sports a new sound mix with a huge dynamic range; once you turn the film up loud enough to hear the dialogue, the screeching stings and Fabio Frizzi score will blow your eardrums out. It’s pretty friggin’ rad.

The Beyond is one of the quintessential Italian horror films and Catriona MacColl is the quintessential Fulci actress, starring in all three films of the director’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy. The Beyond is the second entry in the loosely related series, the first being City of the Living Dead in which the director paired her with Christopher George. I marginally prefer that pairing to this one, in which she plays opposite of David Warbeck. Warbeck’s not bad, though, and he’s got a bit of a Jack Nicholson thing going on with his expressions, but his character’s initial reluctance to believe MacColl’s Liza is frustrating… which isn’t to say it isn’t understandable as she genuinely seems to be losing her mind. That is perfectly understandable, too.

Liza has just inherited the Seven Doors Hotel. Feeling that it’s her last shot to make a successful career for herself, she moves from NYC to New Orleans to oversee the renovation. Naturally, the building is haunted and it doesn’t want to be renovated. After one of her workers is severely injured in a fall and another gets his eye gouged out, Liza encounters a mysterious blind woman who warns her to get the hell out. It turns out the hotel is built on one of seven gateways to hell. If the gate is opened, the dead will walk the earth and the final days will begin. The gate once had a warlock guarding it, but a mob killed him in 1927, which means the world has been unwittingly teetering on the brink of apocalypse ever since.

The Beyond is equal parts supernatural horror and zombie film. I’ve always liked the zombies in a Fulci film, who shuffle around even slower and more mindlessly than the Romero variety. It’s as if Fulci thought Romero’s zombies had too much humanity. Conventionally, they can be stopped with a bullet to the brain, but the characters in Fulci films are always outnumbered and too underpowered to deal with such a threat, which dovetails nicely with his penchant for slow, grueling terror. Most zombies kill swiftly, perhaps mercifully. Fulci zombies are designed to prolong the dread.

To me, The Beyond is the best in the trilogy. While most agree, there are still plenty who prefer one of the other two films, which just goes to show how good the trilogy is as a whole. I must admit, the bleeding eyes of the previous entry are a more arresting image than the clouded eyes of this film. But both films (and numerous others in the director’s filmography) beg the question: What the hell is Fulci’s deal with eyes? Why do they get injured so often in his movies? (Incidentally, one of my favorite parts is when Fulci cameos with a hilariously dubbed New Orleans accent.)

It’s a surreal film in which horrible things happen to oddly detached characters who speak like they’re in some kind of hipster art film. You will see a face melted by a bottle of acid. You will see a man’s tongue and lips devoured by tarantulas. You will see multiple eye injuries and headshots. Little of it makes sense if you don’t surrender to the spirit of the film, which is shamelessly style over substance. You will also see MacColl communicate one of the finest performances of sheer terror ever captured on film. Too many horror directors won’t let their leads become too consumed by fear so that they can continue to function in a conventional narrative (and probably because they don’t want their leading ladies to look “ugly,” which frankly is not a problem for MacColl). Not Fulci. He and MacColl go all the way as the horror is much more important than how it gets there.

Admittedly, it’s not a movie for everyone. Roger Ebert gave the film half a star and said of its midnight showings that “Midnight is not late enough.” The Sun-Sentinel referred to it as “a Z-grade horror movie.” It is also one of the seventy-two movies the UK banned during its idiotic “Video Nasties” initiative. While too many horror fans pray that their scrappy little genre will gain more and more mainstream acceptance, I suspect they haven’t considered that what they’re asking for is safer horror flicks. It’s a genre that usually isn’t firing on all cylinders if mainstream audiences broadly accept it so it genuinely baffles me when I see forum users complain how few horror films get nominated for Oscars.

This one sure is special to me. It is the artful distillation of everything I ever really wanted out of a horror film. It’s kooky and it’s odd and not a bit of it is concerned with reality. And it’s one I keep coming back to, time and time again. It simply rules.

Scanner Cop II, aka Scanners: The Showdown, opens with a small town police department arresting a wanderer. As a shrink tries to analyze the oddly silent perp, he realizes he’s dealing with a scanner by the name of Volkin. By then it’s too late: the scanner psychically commands the cops to attack each other, kicking off a killing spree that has Volkin targeting other scanners as he’s found a way to absorb their powers. I’m going to venture a guess that the original concept was Scanner Vampire (one character uses this exact term), but the producers retooled the script to feature Scanner Cop once that actor agreed to return. Unfortunately, he’s shoved into a mediocre plot without the supporting cast that elevated his performance the last time around, instead leaning heavily on tough cop movie clichés.

Although it’s only been a year since the last film, this one takes place further in the future. There’s no mention of what happened to Scanner Cop’s adoptive father, who was a key reason the last film worked so well. They attempt to fill his absence with Robert Forster as the new commander—and believe me, he’s a master at delivering hokey dialog in a believable way—but their relationship is routine. Scanner Cop himself is just a grizzled loner now, which is much less interesting than a rookie cop making the most of his affliction. Eventually, Scanner Cop will learn to control machinery with psychic lightning, a useful superpower which will never be mentioned again.

So who is Volkin and why does he want revenge? Volkin is the franchise’s lamest villain, having escaped from the mental institution’s scanner ward after Scanner Cop arrested him between films. Despite sporting the same director as the surprisingly grounded previous entry, this is the first Scanners film that ever bored me. The last three sequels did a great job camouflaging their straight-to-video shortcomings with kooky effects and over-the-top performances. This one isn’t terrible for a cheapo sequel, but it is terrible for a Scanners film.

Consider how hard it is to come up with a boring premise in a universe which inherently makes one’s imagination tingle with possibilities. You could go full-tilt 90s sequel and send scanners to space when a weapons manufacturer convinces the government to implement an orbital defense grid (which is secretly a device to amplify his or her scanner abilities). Or, if your budget can’t support spaceships (hard to believe considering both Leprechaun and Critters could) you could have a character like Volkin pose as a cop who the real Scanner Cop has to track down, Miami Blues style. Too highbrow for ya? Then do Scanner Versus Highlander… or versus whatever the hell you can get the rights to. Instead what we get is an uninspired film with absolutely no reason to exist.

Worst of all, most of the good stuff takes place off screen and Volkin doesn’t explode any heads. Instead he sends his victims into meltdown mode, a process which happens too often and takes too long to entertain. At one point my girlfriend left the room, returned, and asked, “That guy’s still melting?” You finally get a head explosion late in the show, but by then it’s too late and not quite as dazzling as any of the franchise’s previous head explosions.

Getting through this Scanners wasn’t nearly as painful as it was to get through The Howling V, which I featured last year, but there are a hundred werewolf films so it’s easy to see why they couldn’t come up with anything new. There are only five scanner films, though, so tell me: Why the hell did the franchise run out of steam so early? Even the laziest screenwriters should have been more inspired than this. It’s a film that reeks of studio interference and/or a cynical pre-production phase.

31 Days of Gore wraps tomorrow, Halloween day. I always revisit an absolute banger for the final day. Subscribe to get an email notification!

“It is something that is happening everywhere to everyone. So… where you gonna go? Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide? Nowhere. ‘Cause there’s no one like you left.”

While I wouldn’t say I’m completely unaffected by the jingoistic stupidity of films like Independence Day, I’ll take a quiet alien invasion almost any day of the week. Body Snatchers is the third of the four films officially based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel. It’s at least the second or third best, depending on how you rank the first: 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I mean, pretty much everyone agrees that the 1978 film is the best of the bunch, right? This one is no slouch either, though, which becomes immediately unsettling under the unusual direction of Abel Ferrara, turning in his first big budget Hollywood film.

With a story worked on by Larry Cohen and Stuart Gordon (separately, I imagine, as they are credited with different types of authorship), the film is confined to an Alabama military base. It’s a move that heightens the claustrophobic tension, the themes of conformity, and the utter hopelessness of the situation. The snatcher scenes are the stuff of nightmares. The pacing is like freeform jazz in the sense that not everyone will get it. Just like I don’t get freeform jazz.

An EPA official arrives, family in tow, to take samples around the base, which stores dangerous wartime chemicals. The main character of the film is the environmental agent’s teenage daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar), who spends much of the opening act rolling her eyes at her step mother (Meg Tilly) and her annoying half-brother. Marti quickly strikes up a friendship with the general’s rebellious daughter and forms a romance with a helicopter pilot (Billy Wirth, who you may recognize as one of The Lost Boys). R. Lee Ermey plays the general (of course) and Forest Whitaker has a small but potent role as the major who is concerned with the paranoia that’s spreading through the infirmary… which isn’t, technically speaking, paranoia at all.

In one chilling scene, Marti’s little brother goes to daycare and discovers his classmates are all finger painting the exact same image. The scene suggests that the snatchers have already taken all the children. The boy is the first in the family to suspect that things are not as they seem. His suspicions are confirmed when he accidentally walks in on a snatching in progress. The imagery is terrifying. Mind you, there’s hardly any blood in the entire film, but it still feels like it contains exactly what horror fans want to see (you know… the stuff we kinda don’t want to see). I don’t think the snatcher screams are quite up to par, but the unusually good character work and the fine filmmaking go a long way toward making this a solid genre flick.

So yeah, at no moment does a character say, “Get me the President on the line.” There aren’t any shots of people standing on the streets to watch as some mega structure fills the sky. At absolutely no time will you believe the humans stand a fighting chance, barring moments when the movie is fucking with you. There is a moment, early on, in which one of the neighbors carries a small bag of trash out to the garbage truck. It’s so small you wonder, “Why would someone bother taking a bag of trash out that small? Hell, why would the director bother to film it?” Sometime later we learn exactly what’s in that bag, shifting the moment from a non sequitur to an unsettling detail.

In one scene, Forest Whitaker’s character is cornered and has to choose between resisting the dominant power, which will lead to death, or joining them, which would be so much easier. It’s a powerful moment in which the viewers have no choice but to imagine themselves in his shoes. Unfortunately, the same scene contains the film’s biggest misstep: when it awkwardly features a monologue explaining the snatchers’ motivation. That kind of tripe sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise atypical movie. I have a feeling Ferrara didn’t like it, either, as I’m pretty sure this is the last mainstream movie he ever did. I can’t help but wonder if the ending was a major compromise between auteur and studio as well because it kind of does neither very well.

Amsterdamned is weird in a great way. Part police thriller, part slasher flick, it moves like a Michael Mann film with cool confidence and expertly shot action. Too many of these movies include a boring foot chase, often with minimal camera movement. This one has a wonderful chase involving a car, a motorcycle, and a couple of horses on the crowded streets of Amsterdam. Later, the good guy and the bad guy speed through the waterways on motorboats, careening around obstacles and tight corners. It’s what movies were made for.

The villain, a scuba diving serial killer, creeps out of the water at night to murder his victims before returning to the canals undetected. Armed with a diving knife and a speargun, many of his kills take place off screen, but the results are nasty. When one of his victims reels an anchor in, he finds the severed head of his buddy attached to the end. (Now, how the villain was able to yank his buddy into the water, cut his head off, and attach it to said anchor without making a sound is a different matter.) Like Jack the Ripper, this villain displays his victims’ remains in startling ways. I don’t know what the Dutch are drinking, but I greatly admire the way their filmmakers handle fantasy violence.

Enter Detective Eric Visser, reminiscent of William Petersen’s detective in Manhunter. Visser is a single father who’s about as hard boiled as a character believably gets. Upon investigating the local scuba scene, Visser meets the film’s love interest, Laura, a museum guide who has taken up diving on the recommendation of her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist will immediately become the audience’s prime suspect as the film takes its time to give him a mysterious backstory that apparently serves no purpose, at least initially. Meanwhile, with precious few leads, the police begin a patrol of the canals that even they admit is a waste of time.

What’s especially attractive about the movie is that director Dick Maas photographs Amsterdam with the same love and street-level attention as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee show for New York. The movie is grounded in that sense, which provides a solid base for its more fantastical elements. For example, the killer displays a baffling resiliency for a guy who hasn’t been established as a supernatural entity. He will be shot several times and at one point blown up in a fiery explosion, but he just keeps coming back. So it’s particularly interesting, perhaps very Dutch, how the conflict ultimately resolves at the end.

Amsterdamned isn’t a visually gory film, but conceptually it is a brutal one. It feels like it’s equal parts Tom Savini and Brian De Palma. While I almost always recommend the subtitled version of foreign films, the dubbed version is easy to source and features English dialogue provided by some of the original actors. As far as dubs go, it’s one of the best I’ve ever heard. It’s also one of the most unique slasher films I’ve ever seen. The biggest mystery is how it seems relatively forgotten, though it was a financial success at the time of its release. It deserves a much bigger following than it currently enjoys.

One thing that has always bothered me about Norman Bates’s mythology: Where’d the wig come from? It’d be easy for a criminally insane person to black out and dress up in his mother’s clothes (after all they’re just hanging there in the closet), but the wig is a different matter. In some sort of fugue state, he’d have to get in a car, drive to the nearest general store, and order the damn thing with at least a week of lead time. Psycho IV, which is mostly an origin story, answers that question as well as several more I didn’t have.

Making this film a partial prequel is the franchise’s biggest misstep. I don’t want to see anyone but Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates, but here we must endure him in flashback form, portrayed by a little boy and a teenager at key points of his life story. The present day segment featuring Perkins goes like this: CCH Palmer, Warren Frost, and John Landis are producing a live radio program about matricide. One of their callers, who refers to himself as Ed, knows a bit about the subject because he’s a poorly disguised Norman Bates. Norman is inexplicably on parole after getting busted for the multiple corpses found at the end of the previous film. So yes, this film asks us to believe that the state let the repeat offender go after only a handful of years—maybe fewer as he’s obviously had enough time to move into a brand new house and get married.

Whatever. It’s always a pleasure to see Perkins in the role, reduced as it may be. He’s never willing to phone it in and he’s always pushing the established boundaries so Norman rarely feels stagnate. As he recounts his earliest memories to the radio program, we see the pertinent ones reenacted out of order. We learn just how close Norman was to his mother, which takes the story in places only hinted at before. This is all stuff that actually strengthens the mythology rather than detracting from it, but it was a mythology that was strong enough to begin with. We were all already on Norman’s side from the very first film. There was no reason to paint him in an even more sympathetic light.

I’m only disappointed because this type of storytelling leaves little room for the precious exploitation elements. You simply can’t generate suspense when your audience knows a character can’t die in his own flashback. Once you accept it for what it is, you’ll find surprisingly well written scenes. It’s also nice to see the Bates Motel and the hilltop house in better times, both painted yellow, while the younger actors portraying Norman do a much better job than Vince Vaughn did in Gus Van Sant’s remake for dummies. One other improvement over parts 2 & 3: the return of Bernard Herrmann’s iconic theme from the first film.

While I would have rather seen Norman escape the institution and continue his killing spree, the more mature approach works better than you would expect. I see why Perkins agreed to come back: the fourth installment leaves the logical ending he gave us in the third film intact while providing the opportunity for a deeper dive into the character… which is unfortunately a lot more interesting for an actor than the audience. So why not make a movie about a different killer and leave Norman’s memory untarnished? Because A) that’s not how the movie business works, kid, and B) this is interesting stuff because it’s about Norman Bates, building on decades of character growth. I don’t think you can accuse Perkins of doing any of these films just for the paycheck. All four are worthwhile, this one less than others. Together they’re among the best horror franchises ever made.

I eventually grew to like the flashbacks, but whereas Norman had become uncharacteristically mean in the previous film, here he becomes downright ugly for his final kill. I’m sorry, folks, but that’s not the Norman I know and love. Get out of here with this bullshit.

Upon retrieving a shiv that he secretly implanted in his arm, the dentist escapes the mental institution by taking his psychiatrist hostage. It turns out that he had been hiding money from the IRS in a small town bank under an alias for years. Assuming the alias as his new identity, he rents a guest cottage from a young woman named Brooke who somewhat resembles his ex-wife, Jamie. Jamie, you’ll remember, is the one whose infidelities made the dentist lose his mind in the first place. Played by Jillian McWhirter, she and Corbin Bernsen are the only returning cast members from the original film.

Jamie, now a mute, has gotten cosmetic surgery after the dentist maimed her and removed her teeth and tongue in the previous film. When she learns he escaped captivity, she hires a private detective to track him down. Meanwhile, through a series of unlikely but predictable events, the dentist finds himself practicing once again, trading the ultra-sterile look of the first film for an old fashioned oak office with tons of shadows. I happen to like sequels that look radically different than the original, but whereas The Dentist’s look ran contrary to typical horror films, The Dentist 2 unfortunately looks a lot more average.

Another downgrade is the cast. Whereas the original film had a number of great character actors, the sequel casts mostly unknowns. Two exceptions are Wendy Robie and Clint Howard, performers who could have easily taken up the slack if they had just been given more to do, but Robie is criminally underutilized while Howard is killed almost as quickly as he’s introduced. I’m also scratching my head over why they went through the trouble of recasting McWhirter as the dentist’s ex when there’s ultimately little reason for her to be in it. In fact, the filmmakers went out of their way to ignore a great setup that practically writes itself: have the dentist struggling to rehabilitate while his wife takes up a revenge plot.

The most major downgrade is the absence of the original’s screenwriters, which included Stuart Gordon. In yesterday’s review, I said I felt they had milked the premise for all it’s worth. The sequel proves it. Even Bernsen isn’t firing on all cylinders until the very end. The original film, though technically meaner, was able to balance its darkness with subtle humor and thrills. The Dentist 2, on the other hand, feels meaner, but only because it’s mean without purpose. By the time the villain straps the hapless secretary who will bear the worst of the torture, it isn’t clever, it isn’t entertaining… it’s just going through the motions.

I guess it’s not a terrible movie. It’s well made and looks better than it cost (south of a million bucks). It just never finds a reason to exist.

Oh, boy. I have never been on a better run of movies than I’m on right now. Continuing the winning streak is Brian Yuzna’s The Dentist, a movie I clearly remember seeing on the New Releases shelf and inexplicably passing on. Maybe I was feeling burned by Dr. Giggles (a film I have since come around on), but The Dentist is clearly the better 90s horror film starring an actor from L.A. Law. (If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I could trade ’em in for a shiny dime.) The titular dentist is played by Corbin Bernsen who not only understands the assignment, but nails it. Today I’m reviewing the Vestron Video release of the film, which looks about as good as you could hope.

When I say I like horror comedy, I would like to clarify that I prefer this to the kind on display in Thursday’s Deathgasm 2. That film was a comedy with elements of horror and buckets of blood. The Dentist is an honest-to-god horror film with an emergent playfulness counterbalancing its mean streak. It’s like taking two oscillators on a synthesizer and tuning them so they drift in and out of phase for a subtly brilliant effect (an analogy I use because the film is scored by Alan Howarth, a frequent collaborator with John Carpenter… and because my midlife crisis resulted in the purchase of a bunch of dumb music gear). I find a movie like this far more amusing than 90% of Hollywood comedies. Co-writers Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, who worked together on Re-Animator and From Beyond, are no doubt a significant reason the film is just as effective with its laughs as it is at giving the viewer the heebie-jeebies.

And boy does it deliver the heebie-jeebies. I’ve been watching horror movies for longer than I’ve been forming memories. They simply don’t scare me and rarely elicit a physical response other than laughter or the occasional cringe. Yet this scrappy little straight-to-video production, with the help of prosthetic mouths and tongues, had me squirming more than the “Is it safe?” scene from Marathon Man did. You could make the argument that building a horror movie around a common fear is playing on easy mode, but the fun is watching Yuzna and his screenwriters squeeze every idea they can from the premise. It culminates in perhaps the only fitting climax anyone could possibly dream up for a movie about a homicidal dentist.

It’s the dentist’s wedding anniversary and he’s just caught his wife with the pool boy. Although he fantasizes about confronting the couple with a loaded pistol, he secretly follows the pool boy to his next job where—wouldn’t you know it—he has sex with the lonely housewife who lives there, too. Meanwhile, a fantastic cast of character actors potential victims are filling the dentist’s waiting room, impatiently awaiting his arrival. Little do they know, his mental condition is devolving by the minute. There’s the beauty pageant queen and her sleazy manager, played by a young Mark Ruffalo. There’s the IRS worker (Earl Boen from the Terminator films) who’s threatening penalization for bogus write-offs. There’s the teenage girl who’s uncharacteristically excited to visit the dentist because it’s the day her braces finally come off.

Then there’s Molly Hagan who, much like Bernsen, gives much more than a film like this typically deserves. She plays the dental assistant who doesn’t trust the dentist, never liked the dentist, and tries to rally her coworkers into seeing through his lies. Ken Foree is also at the top of his game, effortlessly injecting flair into an otherwise stereotypical homicide detective. My only complaint about both of these actors is they should have had bigger roles. I can’t stop talking about this wonderful cast because there’s also Jan Hoag who’s kind of the go-to actress for receptionists, nurses, and waitresses, having worked with everyone from Spielberg to Rob Zombie.

I feel like Yuzna has milked the premise for everything it’s worth, but I can’t help it—I must see the sequel as soon as possible. I half expect it to end my streak of good horror movies (going on like twelve now), but even if it’s almost as good, it’s gonna be a good time. Come back tomorrow to see what I have to say about it.

With a title like Scanner Cop, you’d have to assume it’s the goofiest film in the franchise yet. Somehow it sports the most serious tone since David Cronenberg’s original. Hell, I’d argue that parts of this one are more grounded than that one. As far as the sequels go, I still prefer Scanners III for Liliana Komorowska’s insanely entertaining performance, but Scanner Cop is the more rounded experience. From a technical point of view, it’s probably the best made of the sequels.

In it, two LAPD cops are attacked by a scanner who’s gone critical in a spectacular way, sprouting miniature faces that form on his head like mutant skin tags. The cops have no choice but to put him down, leaving the scanner’s son an orphan. One of the cops takes pity on the boy and adopts him, providing a steady supply of Ephemoral to keep the boy’s scanner symptoms in check. Fifteen years later, the cop is now the commander, welcoming his son to the force as a rookie officer.

Shortly after, multiple policemen are murdered by civilians with no criminal records whatsoever. When the commander realizes he’s dealing with something beyond the LAPD’s understanding, he turns to his adopted son, urging him to temporarily go off his meds so he can scan one of the perps. His son initially refuses, but once he finds himself entangled in the case, he decides to skip dose after dose, slowly slipping down a slope that typically leaves scanners in psychiatric care, prison, or worse.

Despite turning in the most intimidating villain since Michael Ironside’s Revok, Richard Lynch is burdened with the weakest writing of the movie. The role he’s been given is better than what you’d find in most direct-to-video sequels, but it isn’t quite up to par for this movie. Conversely, there’s a believable comradery on display among Scanner Cop’s tight-knit group of coworkers, but the villain’s backstory is only briefly explored and his motivation essentially boils down to plain ol’ revenge. Notably, the villain not a scanner, nor is he allied with scanner henchmen, which gives him a Lex Luther vibe as he fearlessly squares off with the hero.

What’s most interesting about Scanner Cop is what it doesn’t do. There are moments of predictability, maybe even a scene that induces an eyeroll or two, but they’re few and far between. Consider that Scanner Cop’s adoptive father, played convincingly by Richard Grove (Henry the Red in Army of Darkness), seems destined to die by the second act, but the film sidesteps that obvious hero motivator entirely. These characters feel like real cops who care about each other in honest ways, much like the characters in a Maniac Cop film. Somehow, the fun scanner stuff slots in smoothly between the bouts of solid character development.

I don’t have much more to say. It’s just a surprisingly good picture.

No need to watch a recap video before this one. The opening credits feature a song which rapidly brings the viewer back up to speed. Don’t you just miss movies with elaborate opening credits? It’s a lost art and Deathgasm 2 features a fine example of why we should bring them back… along with intermissions for a lot of the dumb Hollywood movies that have no business being three or four hours long. If you’re anything like me, you probably assumed this sequel was going to suck when it was announced it would be a Kickstarter project. Why did the New Zealand Film Commission finance the first one and decline this time around? Perhaps it was the scene involving a zombie mutilating several penises in a glory hole. At any rate, nothing about this picture feels cheaper than the first.

It’s not often that I feature a movie as new as Deathgasm 2, which was only recently made available on streaming services, but it seems fitting as the original was in the first batch of 31 Days of Gore eleven years ago. In that movie, teenage metalheads unwittingly unleashed the forces of evil in their small New Zealand town. (It just occurred to me that I don’t know if that’s actually considered a small town in New Zealand or not, but it’s small by American standards.) In this movie, the metalheads are presumably in their early twenties and purposefully unleash the forces of evil to bring back their dead bandmates.

Perhaps to smooth over the fact that the heroes are directly responsible for the deaths of several people and one dog, Deathgasm 2 becomes considerably more cartoonish. At one point it even breaks the fourth wall like Mel Brooks used to do. I’m gonna be honest: I didn’t need a sillier movie. I’m not disappointed (if anything, Deathgasm 2 exceeds my expectations for a crowdfunded 10-year reunion), but I just prefer the slightly meaner, “don’t give a fuck” tone of the original. I mean, it’s a movie about metal and demonic forces for crying out loud.

What may abrade some viewers is the juvenile humor, the vomit jokes, the higher body count, the much higher mutilated-penis count, and the wall-to-wall gore, the latter of which is nothing short of fantastic. While the original film reminded me of several splatter films, Deathgasm 2 seems primarily interested in emulating Peter Jackson’s first three features. The film particularly invokes Dead-Alive, mostly because Deathgasm 2 turns into a full-on zombie flick as opposed to rehashing the original’s end-of-the-world plot (it also directly references the former with at least one piece of dialogue). The B plot, which has the metalheads vying with a competing band, feels like the kind of lite screenwriting employed whenever an SNL character makes the leap to the big screen. The jokes in service of the band stuff don’t work for me. The jokes in service of the gore work great, but all too often the humor relies on goofy music and reaction shots to sell its verbal gags, which is the cinematic equivalents of hackneyed rimshots.

Another minor downgrade is that Zakk isn’t quite as fun as he was in the first film, very much playing second fiddle to Brody for the entirety of the movie. The filmmakers also decided to digitally alter his voice, but I don’t know… the creative decision kind of makes his jokes fall flat. The same is true of the film’s undead villain: something about the manipulation of the actors’ lines just doesn’t do the comedy any favors. In fact, it does the opposite.

At the end of the day, it’s a great gore movie that sustains its manic playfulness until the very end. It’s stupid, fun, and gloriously gory. If you liked the first one, here’s more of the same tone with a completely different subgenre.