Yummy (2019)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Even from the back row of a pop-up drive-in theater, Yummy was still an entertaining movie. As far as zombie movies go, this little Belgian flick didn't offer much that was new; if you've seen a zombie movie, you probably know the score here. But it still played all the hits well in a humorous, blood-soaked package that was filled with brutal gags of both the gory and comedic varieties, and sometimes both at the same time. It seemed to lose its sense of humor in its third act, however, culminating in a bleak ending that didn't really jive well with the film that came before it. Overall, this won't be replacing Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland in the ranks of zombie horror-comedies any time soon, but if you're an undead-head looking for something new to watch and don't mind a lot of subtitles, give this one a shot.
The plot concerns a young couple, Michael and Alison, and the latter's mother Sylvia who travel to Klinika Krawczyk, a dodgy hospital in Eastern Europe that specializes in plastic surgery. Alison, a fairly meek and shy woman who also has enormous F-cup breasts, is looking to get breast reduction surgery due to both the strain they're causing on her back and the sexual harassment she receives from passersby, while Sylvia's motives are far more vain; this isn't the first time she's had work done, not by a long shot. Once they get there, however, Michael soon learns the hard way that the place is also doing illegal stem cell experiments that wind up going exactly how you think they will in this sort of movie, and together with a handful of surviving doctors and patients, they have to band together and fight for survival.
The gore is easily the great selling point in this film, and it does not skimp out or spend much time cutting away. We get a man's dick being set on fire, loads of zombies digging into humans like a buffet, zombies that have themselves suffered massive bodily damage, and my personal favorite, a liposuction gone wrong that ends with an explosion of blood and fat. The action here combines zombie movie staples with medical horror of the grossest sort, at times leaning in the direction of satirizing society's obsession with beauty and plastic surgery. Many of the protagonists, including Alison and Sylvia, are medical tourists who came to this clinic to get work done for a lot less money than it would cost in the West, and in real life, these sorts of clinics are not exactly known for having patients' safety in mind. (Just ask Jordan Peterson, the psychologist/self-help guru who went to Russia to beat an addiction to benzos... if you can get him to speak after all the damage the detox did to him.) The first act especially is dedicated to painting just this sort of twisted portrait, showcasing why someone might choose to get work done in the first place and then dropping the viewer head-first into the morass of vanity and sleaze that is the clinic where most of the film takes place. Despite Alison's clear discomfort with her large breasts, the doctor tries to pressure her to go even bigger. Other patients are there for chemical peels, penis enlargement, tattoo removal, and cheap abortions. We see a brief shot of a patient chowing down on chocolate before heading in for surgery, clearly interested in acquiring a good-looking body but not as interested in putting in the work. Daniel, a travel agent who works for the hospital, uses his job to have sex with the many women who go there for surgery, describing them as feeling sexy after getting work done and looking to have fun with their new and improved bodies. The doctors, for their part, are shown to be terrible at adhering to safety and sanitation regulations, and the zombie plague, of course, stems from a rejuvenation serum they cooked up that had some unfortunate side effects. The second act is where the film peaks, as a shrinking pool of survivors fights for survival while growing suspicious of one another. There's a brief subplot involving the possibility of a cure, but the film doesn't linger long on it except to establish one character as a clear-cut villain.
It was in the third act where the film's lack of seriousness started to hurt it, as it was around that point that most of the humor fell away and the film asked to be taken seriously as a zombie horror movie. It just did not feel particularly well-earned on the film's part, as many characters were of a particular type of unlikable sort that goes great in a comedy, where you're more than happy to see bad things happen to them for the sake of a laugh, but not so much in a horror movie. With all of the main characters save for Alison and maybe Michael showing themselves to be at least a bit of a jerk if not an outright asshole in the first act, and not really growing over the course of the film, this would've worked a lot better as a pure sadist show in which awful people have horrible things done to them by flesh-eating zombies. On a similar note, the satire of the first act was also mostly gone from the film once the zombies show up, save for a few bits here and there that serve as some of the highlights of the film. The zombie action was played just a bit too straight for the film this was trying to be, and while it was spectacular, it felt like the film missed some great possibilities. The subplot of Michael seeking to propose to Alison also felt undercooked to the point that I barely even remembered it until it was brought up again at the very end, causing the film's surprisingly dark ending to feel less like a tragic twist and more like a diabolus ex machina.
The Bottom Line
Yummy may have an off-putting title, and it may feel rather disjointed, but if you have a Shudder account, check it out. It's a nice bit of international zombie goodness whose high points are downright bangin'.
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And now, for the second half of the feature...
The Beach House (2019)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
Maybe a drive-in just isn't the right place to see a movie like this, because despite all the praise I've seen for it, I didn't get much out of The Beach House. An apocalyptic eco-horror story told mostly within the confines of a beachfront house, it had a likable lead, some grisly body horror, and bleak atmosphere to spare, but its minimalist cast unfortunately did not contain enough likable or fleshed-out characters for me to care about all of them. It was a very slow and ponderous movie, and while anybody who knows me knows that I can easily groove to an artsy, grim, slow-burn horror flick, there needs to eventually be some kind of payoff, in terms of scares, plot developments, character growth, or preferably all of the above, and this film was lacking in all three. It never seemed to fully understand where it wanted to go, and as a result, it ultimately felt hollow, like a pastiche of Lovecraftian motifs without much of a soul or mind of its own. If you want to see a film with a similar plot and ideas but done much better, check out the recent adaptation of Color out of Space.
The protagonists are Emily and Randall, a young couple staying at a beach house owned by the latter's father. There, they find out that his parents are already renting the place out to Mitch and Jane, an older couple who are friends of the family, and they decide to make it a four-person vacation. They all shoot the shit with one another, all while strange things start happening in the beachfront community around them, strange things that soon turn out to be connected to the ocean itself. The first problem here is that Emily is the only character who gets much development, and by extension, the one character who is obviously going to be the last one standing. This would not have been a problem if the film had felt like Emily's story, built around her as a character and having her react to the death and awfulness around her. Yet while she did get the most screen time by far, and Liana Liberato gave a fine performance in the part, the film didn't seem particularly interested in her as a person. Rather, it seemed focused mainly on the apocalyptic scenario unfolding around her. Without an anchor for it all to make us care, it just felt like a parade of misery without much of a purpose. The thing about H. P. Lovecraft is that his stories, for all their alien monstrosities making humanity feel tiny and powerless, ultimately centered on those tiny and powerless humans, because that's how you get your reader, or in this case your viewer, to also feel tiny and powerless, as though the lives and accomplishments they thought were so important ultimately amounted to nothing in the face of a cold and uncaring universe. That's what we should've gotten in the first half of this movie: establish who these people are, flesh them out into three-dimensional characters that we care about, and then completely and utterly break them. What we get instead are rather tedious philosophical discussions that are literally fueled by weed, as if the film wanted me to make the joke about it feeling like it was written by college freshmen who have just had their minds blown by their Intro to Philosophy professor. It was very interested in putting on airs of intellectualism, but in doing so, it took half its runtime to get to the point and felt aimless and out of its depth in doing so.
The film picked up nicely in the second half, where the bad things start happening in earnest. This part is punctuated by some great gross-out gags that are sparingly used but remarkably well done, most notably something very bad happening to Emily's foot. When it doesn't show, it implies just enough to let us know that something terrible either is happening or has happened to these people, and the atmosphere in and around the beach house starts to feel increasingly desolate (why is nobody else at the beach?) and eventually hostile. It may be, shall we say, evocative of any number of other, better films, most notably The Fog, but it was a familiar story told well, one in which all manner of horrors could be lurking just outside of your field of view. It was here where the film came into its own as a tense survival horror story, no longer meandering and trying to appear smarter than it is like in the first half. Unfortunately, like I said, having no real characters to care about kept the stakes fairly low, nowhere near the doomsday that this scenario is supposed to be. We are told that whatever's happening is the literal end of the world, yet the film never really manages to broaden its scope beyond the beach house and this small group of people within it. It breaks the classic "show, don't tell" rule of storytelling, and as such, I always felt that I was experiencing it from a safe distance.
The Bottom Line
The Beach House is a movie with plenty of ambition and some good atmospheric horror once it starts moving, but its leaden first half weighs it down and prevents it from really taking off. Shame, because if the parts I liked were any indication, the director clearly has a better movie in him.
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