Okay, perhaps movies that seek purely to make you sick to your stomach are abusing our whole “right to free speech” thing, but dammit if I’m not happier than a pig in putrid, bloody, pus-filled dung that they are around.  This past weekend, I sat down with some friends to do a double feature of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever and its DTV sequel, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever.  To be honest, when I first saw Roth’s original in the theater I was disappointed…but I’ll give it this: it holds up.  I was still disappointed with it.  However, after you wade through an hour long swamp of underdeveloped characters yammering at each other, the last twenty minutes of the picture are a lot of fun.  Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever takes that last twenty minutes and turns into eighty minutes of pure disgustingness.  And this is a good thing.

It opens with the original movie’s star, Rider Strong (if that’s your name and you aren’t a porn actor, they what’s that say about the size of your dork?), running in front of a school bus and exploding like a big bubble of blood.  And then the virus (or whatever it’s supposed to be that makes everything so disgusting) takes a trip to the prom, and we are treated to endless gore, including near constant vomiting of blood, brutal killings with exploding heads, and unfortunate morons disintegrating as a result of whatever the hell it is that tainted the town’s water.  Other highlights include a sex scene in a pool with a morbidly obsese girl that my friends and I came to call “White Precious” and a scene in a bathroom where a sickly boy takes out his penis to show his friends that it is bleeding and draining pus as a result of a blow job he shouldn’t have accepted.  My friends and I were screaming with disgust the entire time, and if that isn’t the kind of magical visceral reaction motion pictures are supposed to elicit, I don’t know what is.  If you are easily nauseated, by all means stay the hell away from this thing, but if you love a good gross-out you can only do slightly better…

Which brings me to another movie, which technically isn’t DTV because it had an extremely limited theatrical release, but damn it is a good time.  Troma’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is exactly as dumb as it sounds, and how wonderfully dumb it is.  Like most of Troma’s releases, it is relentlessly politically incorrect, putting the worst racist jokes, sexist jokes and homophobic jokes on display, and when they run out of that crap they make the proceedings about nudity and/or diarrhea.  The acting is terrible, the movie is overlong and meanders all over the place, and every joke drops like rock.  It is perfect.  And there are songs.  My wife made me shut it off after twenty minutes because all the puking and shitting and blood-letting made her sick.  And she’s a tough chick, too, but this proved too much for her.  Not for me, of course.  I watched the rest while eating lunch the next day.  I haven’t laughed that much in a while, at least not all in one sitting.

Did I mention there were lesbians?

Lots of love, Tonn