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.
