"Meat Market 2" (2001)

• Dir. & Writer: Brian Clement
• Starring: Bettina May, Alison Therriault, and Stephen Eng

          Sometimes you end up renting a movie that's pretty bad. Hey, it happens to all of us. Maybe you're lured in by some lurid cover art, or the movie just looks cool. Then, other times, you'll actually want to rent a movie based purely on how absolutely crap it looks, and you want a laugh. Sometimes the movies will turn out just to be boring pieces of shit, but then there are the ones that are absolute gold, the lowest of the low, Z-grade films that defy explanation and yet are somehow entertaining as hell. "Meat Market 2" is one of those films.
         However, the first "Meat Market", which I rented on Netflix, is of the former category. I couldn't even get through the first hour. It plodded along with nothing interesting happening, the lighting was terrible, and half the time I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. It wasn't even "so bad it's good", it was just horrible, and nothing interesting happened that I could rip on, so the movie wasn't even entertaining.
          In that respect, "Meat Market 2" is far superior to the first installment, though not in terms of quality (although the production values are certainly higher - it looks a full 30 dollars more expensive than the first). The sequel has a much better grasp on the material, and rather than focusing on boring people that we don't give a fuck about middling around in a deserted landscape, we just get 80 minutes of a retarded plotline, incredibly shit dialogue, some good old low-budget gore, and a cast made up of bizarre weirdos and eccentric freaks.
          The plot involves three survivors from the first film who save a woman (who I swear looks like Velma) from a bunch of zombies. She leads them to a survivors outpost where she reveals that she's the head of security of this "outpost", which turns out to be some sort of Communist cult where the people get to do whatever they want as long as they contribute to the community. The guy who runs this whole thing is some Bill Gates-looking motherfucker who reveals that he used to be an award-winning motivational speaker, and sends the three characters off to various places.
          The main character (whom we'll call Titties) is sent off to be assimilated into the cult, while her friends are sent off to be examined and experimented on. Titties doesn't buy the cult's ramblings, and soon she learns that they are slaughtering the members after they have grown fat and juicy and are no longer useful and eating their flesh! "Giving back to the community" indeed! Meanwhile, the scientists in the community are also performing experiments on the zombies, trying to get them to mate with humans in order to create some kind of epic human/zombie hybrid... thing. But of course, the zombies escape and havoc ensues.
          If that doesn't sound like the most bug-fuck insane movie you've ever heard of in your life, please tell me what you've been watching - I'd like to see it. The film is like a terrible 1930s pulp novel come to life, but with modern gore and sexuality. It's an absolutely brilliant combination. The film badly wants to be a high-brow political/social satire, but it fails pretty fucking hard.
          Whenever they try to make a joke it falls completely flat on it's ass and elicits laughs from absolutely no one. Or rather, it DOES elicit laughs. Just not the kind of laughs writer-director Brian Clement was looking for. Actually, I can't really figure out what exactly the film is trying to lampoon. Is it satirizing capitalism? Communism? Fascism? Nazism? Motivational speaking? I don't know, and I suspect that Clement didn't know either.
          Now, what does get laughs? The horrible home-made zombie gore, for one. It all looks like it's made out of papier-mache and being held up on sticks. But there are those little things that take the film above just another shitty Z-movie. For example, there's a scene where Titties catches Bill Gates and friends having a feast of body parts and it all looks like that plastic shit you can buy at the store. Pretty average for a crappy horror movie, you think. That is, until you see one of the girls actually take a fake penis out of a serving dish and shove it in her mouth. I couldn't believe what I saw, and laughed until I nearly died.
          What else gets laughs? The cast of characters, seemingly drawn at random from a hat. There's "Lesbian Vampire Chick", "Asian Snake Plissken", "Velma-If-She-Finally-Gave-Into-Her-Butch-Side"... Oh, but there's so much more! Of particular hilarity is the doctor who only performs autopsies on sexy lady corpses. And before you ask, yes, you get to see him have sex with a pile of organs and even fuck a skull with maggots all over it. During these scenes he makes the most nauseating "oh yeah" noises I've ever heard in a film. Gross? Yes. But don't worry, he gets his when "Lesbian Vampire Chick" comes back to life and eats him.
          The film is like one big collection of massively retarded yet funny things happening. There's the aforementioned penis-eating scene, but there's also a scene where one of the members of the group (who looks like an Asian Snake Plissken) gets injected with something to make him horny (I think) and we get to see his own private fantasy in his head, where the women are all topless and like to have pillowfights. And then, for some reason that isn't adequately explained, a bunch of zombies rush in and eat all the girls. Oh, and he also gets maggots shoved into his arm to make him into a zombie. The maggots are actually nanites that turn people into zombies, you see.
          While watching the film I had a hard time figuring out where all of the budget went. Overall it looks pretty cheap, the headquarters of the cult is filmed in some kind of hospital/office building with extremely crappy flags painted on the walls, and the zombie special effects look like they shouldn't have taken more than 50 dollars to make. It's certaintly not the camera; it looks like any cheap miniDV camcorder you can buy at the store for a couple hundred bucks. So where did all the money go? And then I got to the end, and I figured it out. The two survivors, Lesbian Vampire Chick and Titties, throw a grenade into the building and as they run out there are two huge explosions that looked very expensive. Then it hit me.
          And then... at practically the tail-end of the movie, there's the weirdest, most unexplainable thing to happen throughout the entire film. As Vampire Chick and Titties run out of the building, there are several zombies surrounding them. They cower in fear with no hope for escape! What ever will they do? Then... completely out of nowhere, a fucking Mexican Luchador wrestler, complete with a multicolored wrestling mask, materializes out of the ether, shouts some gibberish in what I assume is Spanish, and begins wailing on zombies, spinning around and hitting them like some sort of fat, sweaty, Mexican top. And then, as the pile of rotting, now dead corpses surrounds him, he disappears in a flash of light, just as quickly as he came. And then the audience's collective mind collectively EXPLODES.
          The acting, surprisingly, isn't god-awful, but none of these people are taking home Oscars, and they are DEFINITELY never going to be in another movie again, ever. The best actor in the place is the Bill Gates-looking motherfucker. He throws himself into his role with complete conviction, no matter what it requires him to do, and that includes beating a zombie around the head with a baseball bat and reading off a motivational speech to a bunch of walking corpses as he gets eaten. The rest of the cast is pretty much told to stand around and look comatose, which is especially easy for Lesbian Vampire Chick as she actually spends most of the film unconscious.
          I know what you're thinking. "This sounds like the greatest movie ever made!" Well, if the schizophrenic insanity that I've just described to you sounds appealing, by all means pick it up. It's on Netflix instant watch, but I've heard of people finding these things in bargain bins in Wal-Mart and the like, so keep an eye out. However, if you do watch it, I'd recommend getting incredibly drunk. Like, so drunk that you don't even remember what your fingers are for, lest you end up LOSING YOUR MIND from the Lovecraftian horrors that lie within the black putrescent mass that is "Meat Market 2". Luckily, I've been insane for years, so the film had absolutely no effect on me, but IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. Sleep tight!

Note: I looked all over YouTube and I couldn't find a trailer for Meat Market 2. It's that obscure. However, I DID find a trailer for Meat Market 3 (yeah, it's a trilogy), which I will embed for you. Enjoy!