Rating: B-
Dir: Cody Clarke.
Star: Jamie Saunders, Cody Clarke, Chloe Pelletier, Jack Gordon.
Just as James Cameron decided that, if one alien was scary, what could be scarier than… Aliens, so Clarke has upped the ante from one ramekin to a… whatever the collective noun is for ramekins. A flock? Pack? Brûlée of ramekins? A ramekarmy? Well, to be fair, there’s only six, in addition to the one from the original movie. But that’s enough. What this done instead is goes meta. Very meta. Dare I say, mega-meta. Because it centers on a film-maker, Cody (Clarke), who contacts our heroine, Emily (Saunders), and recruits her for a movie he’s making about… yep, a killer ramekin which terrorizes a young woman. He thinks she would be perfect for the role.
What follows is a blizzard of self-referential loops back to previous events. This both builds on, and deepens, events of the first movie – turns out, for example, it wasn’t just the “everything was a dream” which it might have seemed to the less observant [and I will raise my hand as guilty of falling into that category]. When I say “deepens”, I mean “deep.” There’s a suggestion that artistic inspiration is actually the creator momentarily seeing an alternate reality, where the fiction is actually happening. This plays out against the background of Cody getting Emily to act out his script, which is basically the events of the first movie – with more ramekins, brought in as props. As on most low-budget movie shoots, people come and go. Here, it’s because Emily is making them vanish.
“Listen to me. This is the movie, and the universe you glimpsed when you saw my face for the first time, was another movie. And that was horror, and this is horror, and we’re just in it. There’s nothing to ‘make’ – our failure is part of the horror, part of the movie… I just have to do my part. I have to kill you.” That monologue likely does as good a job of summing up this experience, as anything I could write. Though there are interesting wrinkles too, like Emily’s relative, who goes on a road trip which seems irrelevant, except to get him out of the apartment. He then becomes highly significant at the end.
Obviously, you definitely need to have seen its predecessor to get the most from this. I’d also say, there isn’t quite the same sense of charming novelty as the first time. Which is fair enough: it’s not as if ramekins can evolve into a new form, like we saw in Tremors II: Aftershocks. Though I would certainly have been up for Ramekin II: Flying Ramekins. Instead, Clarke has zigged when the obvious thing to do was zag, and delivered a head-trip of a movie. It could be argued it’s a little too cerebral for its own good. I probably wanted a couple more ramekin attacks, and less chit-chat. But I am really intrigued for whatever might happen in the trilogy’s conclusion.