the bottom shelves of mom-and-pop video stores back in the ’80s. I’m still as entertained by a few earnest gore gags and tasteless jokes as I was when I was a lad. I don’t know if this is a subconscious reaction
I
to aging, or an indication that I’m comfortable with my inner child, or simply easily amused, or just hopelessly immature. What I do know is that a pair of no-budget efforts written and directed by young ’un Eamon Hardiman and recently released by In- dependent Entertainment left a stupid grin smeared across my grumpy ol’ mug. Porkchop II: Rise of the Rind (2011) is a retitling
of Porkchops, a sequel to a film I’d never heard of previously. It opens with a completely gratuitous lesbian sex scene that is refreshingly not an ado- lescent girl-on-girl fantasy. But it ends much too quickly when a brute wear- ing only a pig’s head mask (yep, this is Porkchop), denim coveralls and work boots mashes one girl’s face into her lover’s crotch until she suffocates. Then he graphically guts the other with a posthole dig- ger. Simon (Sam Qualiana) is
a disaffected teen moving from the city to the country with his cash-strapped parents (Stephen Hensley and Lisa Taylor). After being kicked out of the car on a dirt road near their destination by his angry father, Simon meets and quickly falls in love with the free-spirited Meg (Angela Pritchett). Meg seems to genuinely like Simon, but is more
excited by the local legend of Porkchop, whose former home Simon’s parents just bought. Simon does not adjust well to his new high school, but the popular kids still crash a party at his house when his parents return to the city. After all, every
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’m well past the halfway mark of my ex- pected lifespan, yet I’ve never lost my fondness for the sort of low-budget, shot- on-video horror fare I used to rent from
Porkchop II: Rise of the Rind
slasher needs fodder. At only 70 minutes, Porkchops never outstays its
welcome. The leads are especially engaging, but the entire cast delivers delightfully quirky perform- ances, and the final twist is fun. Technical short- comings, such as shaky establishing shots of the moon, only add to the charm. Even the uneven gore effects, which include a too-brief scene of a bong being rammed through a skull and an awkward time- lapse sequence of a head being crushed into a tree, work in the film’s favour. Porkchops was shot dig-
itally and looks far better than a film that only cost a thousand bucks to make should. Extras include a commentary track, a 53-
minute featurette on the production, and eight trail- ers for other Independent Entertainment films. The second half of our double bill is Zombie Ba-
bies (2011), which is likely the first splatter comedy ever made about abortion! Three young couples go to Burt Fleming’s (Brian Gunnoes) Hotel and Casino for an annual Abortathon and a weekend of fun and frolic. Before Burt and his manservant Teddy (Rob Cobb) can fully wield their coat hangers, though, the still in which Burt brews his life-extending
moonshine explodes all over the pile of aborted fetuses in the basement. Hilariously green- screened imitations of Full Moon puppets conse- quently begin killing off the guests, including a particularly disgusting gag death in which a man drowns in baby feces!
The cast features several
actors from the previous film who deliver similarly satisfying performances, but the sheer depravity of the humour is amped to a degree probably only toler- able by the most debauched of audiences. Aside from the aforementioned baby shit death, there’s an umbilical cord beheading, and a dis- embodied baby penis ejac- ulating in a poor girl’s face. Apart from unconvincing
greenscreen work, production values are stepped up here. Again, the movie was shot on digital and looks as good as a flick like this can. Extras in- clude a commentary track, a sixteen-minute be- hind-the-scenes featurette, and seven of the same trailers as on Porkchop II. I snickered shamelessly through these two
flicks, while deep down inside, a small voice won- dered if I would ever outgrow this stuff. So far, the answer is “no.”