Rating: B
Dir: Declan O’Brien
Star: Jenny Pudavick, Tenika Davis, Kaitlyn Wong, Terra Vnesa
As the title suggests, this is a prequel, showing how the three (fine) young cannibals escaped from the Glenville Sanatorium for the Criminally Insane and Overly Nom-nom-nomish in 1974, and then leaping forward 29 years, to just before the time of the first movie. They are still lurking around the now-deserted facility, but their peace is disturbed by the arrival of a group of college students, who had got lost in a winter storm while out snowmobiling, and seek refuge. Hey, home delivery meals! Needless to say, it’s not long before the photogenic but largely uninteresting kids are being hunted, caught, dismembered and turned into fondue(!) by the residents. I kid you not. Oh, and memo to self: if someone is being pulled up with a barbed-wire garotte, it’s probably…unhelpful to pull on their legs.
I decided I was going to like this one right from the pre-credit sequence, where the lunatics take over the asylum, to the strains of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. That ends with the director suffering one of the most impressive fates (at least in the unrated edition) I’ve seen in any recent horror flick. If nothing which follows quite lives up to this, there’s no shortage of unpleasant deaths: the film may take a bit longer than I’d like to reach these, however, it does at least chuck in some lesbians to tide the viewer over. The victims are your average stereotypes, who drink, smoke dope, have pre-marital sex and – most importantly – die horribly, but I have to respect the director for knowing what matters, and largely skipping any real effort to make us give a damn about them.
And stop me if I’m wrong, but there seemed a curiously fascist subtext to this. Obviously, the villains are basically a damn good argument in favour of eugenics, but one scene was in there, apparently for the sole reason of satirizing the democratic process, and another has one of the party pleading for the cannibals’ lives, after they’ve been captured. No prizes for guessing how that works out, but let’s just say, she ends up putting the “bleeding” into “bleeding heart liberal.” Hohoho. Yes, it’s probably all complete bollocks, but it has few pretensions and keeps the carnage rolling with a good deal of energy and fair degree of imagination.