As a product coming out of the gates of the Weinstein throes where they took a painfully mediocre television series and turned it in to a form of producing an honest to goodness horror film, “Feast” kicked my ass from here to Thailand as a truly great horror comedy with some bone breaking action, creepy horror, and genuine comedy that induced laughter whenever it damn well pleased. “Feast II” takes the same turns as the original did but this time with Gulager able to take his own twist and storytelling abilities and include his own usual suspects i.e. his wife and father who prominently featured in the first half of the sequel known as “Sloppy Seconds.”
And boy does Gulager’s sequel feel like sloppy seconds because as a follow up it’s every bit the antithesis to “Feast” I feared it would be and ninety percent of the time tends to feel like someone imitating the style from the original monster movie. Gulager doesn’t just feature his family in the film so much as he shoehorns them in to a horribly contrived plot that completely destroys any of the genius and brilliance the original film held so prominently. Characters who humorously died are suddenly not dead, throwaway characters we thought were done with are tacked on for ridiculous story motivation and Gulager even seems to take a page from Rob Zombie’s directing methods and relies on shaky cam and faux grindhouse trailer trash chic to distract us from the fact that this sequel is nothing but an utter waste of time.
Even as a campy C picture, it’s a pale carbon copy of the first treating its characters like cartoons rather than over the top heroes while every convention he worked at breaking in the first film are adhered to here. Beyond the endless horde of complete ridiculous gags from a monster screwing a cat, to an infant being fed to the beasts, “Sloppy Seconds” is a follow up that should have remained a flight of wishful thinking for Gulager, because left to his devices we’re given a monster movie with barely any monsters, gore with all off screen grue, and an ending that fails to tackle the clever surprise the original did. It’s very disappointing to see that “Sloppy Seconds” is really nothing more than a simple retread of material from the first movie with none of the wit, clever plot twists, great acting and everything else that had me glued to my seat. It’s just an awful movie, and fails as a competent horror movie.