Yummy is exclusively the domain of 12-year-old boys, and a hard pass for everyone else.
It’s hard to imagine anyone clamoring for more zombie content these days, not after the past decade-plus of The Walking Dead, it’s various spinoffs, and abundance of imitators. The new Shudder original Yummy is a few years late to the party, but even if released at the height of zombie madness, this (ahem) crummy movie would’ve failed to make much of an impression. The big selling point here is that Yummy is, ostensibly, an irreverent comedy, except director Lars Damoiseaux and co-writer Eveline Hagenbeek are no Edgar Wright (beginning with the evidence that they have never met a cliche they didn’t like). The film presents a tedious 90 minutes of simply going through the motions, and while there’s ample gore to be found, none of it is especially exciting or creatively executed.
Alison (Maaike Neuville), along with her boyfriend Michael (Bart Hollander) and mother Sylvia (Annick Christiaens), is traveling to a non-descript, vaguely Eastern European plastic surgery institute. Because Damoiseaux and Hagenbeek think it’s some kind of clever irony, Sylvia is an aging sexpot who is addicted to elective surgeries while Alison is desperate for breast reduction surgery. And unable to resist this particular low hanging fruit, Yummy features a onslaught of jokes about Alison’s cup size and how making them smaller is an offense to God. You know, funny stuff. While at the institute, amidst various shenanigans, Michael inadvertently unleashes patient zero, and it quickly becomes a fight for survival. You’ve certainly seen all of this before — a makeshift group forms and its members get picked off one by one, leading to an inevitable betrayal and revealing that the real monster is…human nature! There is one novel sequence, as a patient at the clinic who is recovering from penis enlargement surgery picks an inopportune time to remove the bandages, exposing his new, plus-size member to both fire and ice, but otherwise it’s just standard head wounds and teeth gnashing. And because everyone involved seems committed to making things as unpleasant as possible, Damoiseaux ends the movie with a noxious attempted sexual assault and a truly dispiriting bit of nihilism. Yummy is exclusively the domain of 12-year-old boys, and a hard pass for everyone else.
You can currently stream Lars Damoiseaux’s Yummy on Shudder.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2020 – Dispatch 1.
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