Meadhall of the Comitatus

I’m really not sure what possessed me to revisit that whole “giant rats eating people” thing so soon after last year.  I guess I was kinda surprised that the last one was not that horrible, and I remembered being warned to never EVER see the sequel.  Now what kind of person would I be if I listened to that advice?  I mean other than a smarter and more well-adjusted one.

. . .

Premise: 1/5

Hey, guess what?  Giant rats attack!  And only the beefcake scientist who packs more guns and ammo then a three-year subscription to “Guns and Ammo” can save the day!  Hasta la Vista, Deoxyribonucleic Acid!

And you know what?  It’s all PETA’s fault.  Go ahead and blame them—it’s true and it’s cleansing.  Our movie takes place on a research university’s campus, where some horrible and vainglorious bastards in lab coats are performing cruel animal experiments in the name of “cancer research” (also, they are—no kidding!—hoping that somehow this will also cure baldness).   Meanwhile, up the hall is Professor Neil’s (the aforementioned beefcake scientist) lab, and he refuses to experiment on animals until an old teacher of his introduces  him to an overgrown 11 year old named Bobby, begging for his help in finding a cure for the poor kid’s condition.  Not only is it stressful being probably 10 feet tall or so, he also seems to be unraveling mentally the bigger he gets, and it’s most likely only a matter of time before something disastrous happens.

Please hammer, don't--you know what? Just forget it.

And that’s about as much as you’ll hear about Bobby for most of the movie, because that’s just the “explanation” for the “plot” that is to follow.  See, the PETArds don’t know about Neil’s altruistic goal, and they’re such cunts it probably wouldn’t matter if they did.  They bust into Neil’s lab where the only thing he’s grown extra-large so far are some vegetables, but in their bumbling dipshittery they somehow knock the rat cage over, letting the little guys they were trying to rescue get their rodentures all over these veggies, which has the resultant effect of making them about as big as a medium size dog and three times as voracious—for human faces.  I think you can figure out the rest of the plot from here, such as it is.

Her Native American name is "Snogging with Rats."

Cast: 2/5

Well, at least the movie isn’t a hundred percent horrible in every department.  The guy who plays Prof Neil (Paul Coufos) isn’t that bad.  He’s not good, per se, but he’s tolerable and doesn’t make my skin crawl every time I see him.  The main dickhead professor, Delhurst (Colin Fox—though in my head I hear his name as “Colon Fox” and giggle), is pretty amusing in a mincing cheeseball kind of way, and manages to turn some dreadful lines into something almost entertaining.  But anything that doesn’t suck about these two is utterly ruined by all the idiot students and zany characters this movie tries to make you give half a shit about.  And there’s far, faaaarrrrr more of them.  And it hurts.

See, this scene is funny because the book that guy's trying to beat a giant rat to death with is "Animal Farm," though you can't see it from this angle. And that's funny because it actually has the word "animal" in the title? Get it?!

Because somehow, into this mediocre blend of college campus and giant rats, the geniuses behind “Gnaw” decided it would be great if it was all winky-ironic-comedic in the style of latter-day Nightmare on Elm Street movies.  Given how miserable their idea of comedy is, and how much of the movie is made up of supposedly funny gags, you can kiss any actual sense of horror goodbye.  Hell, it takes almost an hour of the movie’s runtime for anything to actually happen after the initial break-in and face-eating scenes.  That’s a lot of time to kill with terrible characters acting horny, or weird, or jackassy, sprinkled with way too much silly shit thrown into the movie for laughs that just straight up sucks.  Oh, you’d like an example, would you?  How about the exterminator that gets called in when the rats first escape (before anyone really believes they’ve grown to excessive size) who carries a flamethrower around?  See, it’s funny because we all know exterminators don’t REALLY carry flamethrowers!  Ha-ha-ha—kill me.  Please.  Just do it and end this nightmare.

Thanks a lot, late ’80s.  Asshole.

I'm in my happy place, I'm in my happy place. This isn't happening. It's not real. It's--who the hell is this guy anyway? And what the fuck is he doing?

Technical: .5/5

Wow.  Just wow.  I mean, really, just about everything’s bad in this movie, except for a very few gore effects (which registers as merely sort of OK), but the level of ineptitude is mind boggling.  I lost count of the number of times I saw boom mics hanging out at the top of shots, somehow completely unnoticed by the directors and post processing guys (assuming this was ever “directed” or “processed” and not merely shat out and sent straight to VHS while it was still steaming).  There’s a scene involving one of the college students getting into his car after practice, and as he starts to drive away, one of the giant fucking rats pops up from his back seat and starts taking bites out of him—how the hell did it unlock the car door, crawl in the back, shut the door, and then wait patiently for its next meal?  Professor Neil has a pet rat (white, of course, ‘cuz it’s one of the good guys) that everyone in the movie constantly refers to as a “she” even though you can clearly see its balls in just about every shot “she” is in.  But I think the coup d’awful has to be the scene where Professor Delhurst, having stolen Neil’s synthesized “stuff gets huge” chemical, is studying it under a microscope and breaks the slide it’s on (that’s what all highly respected and experienced scientists at research universities do all the time, right?), cutting himself and getting the goo into the cut in the process.  Somehow, instead of enhugenizing him, it just gives him cancer super extra duper fast and he starts becoming a walking tumor collection.  And that wouldn’t be so bad, but in the process of his protracted cancer death, you can see a pair of hands at the bottom of the screen, clearly pumping the pus and other bodily goo that are supposed to be shooting off Delhurst’s face through a pair of hoses going up through the back of his lab coat and into his prosthetic makeup.  This isn’t some “blink and you’ll miss it” moment of accidental dumbness, you can see the special effects guy’s hands doing their work for, hell, I don’t know, maybe five minutes or so?  You pretty much can’t miss them.  And yet, somehow, someone did.  I rest my case.

And yeah, here's the proof. I hope you can still see the technical wizardry on display here.

Popcorn Factor: 1/5

I remember being very surprised how quickly things moved along in the first “Food of the Gods,” especially since what I knew of Bert I. Gordon was usually quite the opposite.  This is the kind of movie I was expecting the original to be—sooo much nothing happening, only it’s even worse than a typical Gordon flick because of the alleged comedy.  There’s a huge body count, sure, and a couple decent gore effects and kills, but this movie is just a chore to get through, and the bright spots are still pretty damned dull.  I’d stay away from this because it runs perilously close to being one of the worst “2″ movies I’ve ever seen.  Chud 2: Bud the Chud, Return of the Living Dead 2, Troll 2 and now this are making 2 a scary number indeed.  It’s got me worried about what the future holds, since there’s another 2 movie I’m being afflicted with later this month . . .

It's funny, because she's about to get eaten. In the pool area. Get it?

3 Things I learned from “Gnaw: Food of the Gods II”

1.  The guy with the bad combover actually has a hairpiece!  God that’s funny!  If you’re an idiot.

2.  Even when played for laughs in a dream sequence, a suddenly embiggenized guy having sex with a girl on a table can be fucking creepy.  It looks like he’s banging a toddler on a changing table.  Gross.

3.  Cars don’t eat your liver.

Scariest scene in this movie: SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING! Turn it off turn it off turn it OFF!