Corpse Grinders 2 (2000)

CORPSE GRINDERS 2

WRITER: Ted V. Mikels

DIRECTOR: Ted V. Mikels

STARRING:
   Sean Morelli as Landau
   Andy Freeman as Maltby
   Chuck Alford as Caleb
   Liz Renay as Cleo
   Shanti as Felina
   Paul MacDonald as Dr Howard Glass
   Cara Jo Basso as Angie
   Ted V. Mikels as Professor Mikoff
   Gene Paul Jones as Borath

SYNOPSIS: The nephews of Landau and Maltby team up to revive their uncles' legacy, in more ways than just making the best darn cat food out there.  They also encounter a surprising number of people with exactly the same names and jobs as their uncles met.  Oh, and there's cat aliens looking for a little something to eat lurking around.

THE WHOLE BLOODY MESS: And here we go again.  This is an oddity for Trisk, since I don't want to do movies that are TOO recent, but when I saw there was a sequel to Corpse Grinders, I just had to check out Corpse Grinders 2: Electric Boogaloo.

The old corpse grinder itself is back and badder than ever.  It looks almost exactly the same, except for a few motherboard slapped to the side, more blinky lights, a new set of blades that don't look like a hand lawn mower propped up on its side, and even a real power switch!  Not made for the unit since the box is clearly marked "Hitachi Camera Power Unit".  We're not even 30 seconds in, and I already have a sinking feeling about this movie.

Atomic camera batteries to power!

A lot of the machine is still the same though.  The same basic layout, the conveyor belt is very similar, the feed hopper in the top for grains and such, they even broke out the same crappy red and green gels for the lighting.  Oh joyous day.

I do wonder with the new people taking up the reigns of Lotus and going back to the corpse grinder, did Landau leave detailed notes?  Would he be that dumb?  Maltby maybe.  If they left notes, did they at least leave a list of do nots, like don't kill hobos, and tell everyone your secret?  Failing notes, just leave a copy of the first movie to watch as an instructional video of what not to do in a bad movie.

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After the titles, we're treated to a text crawl explaining some backstory across a starfield and fading into the background, just like Star Wars.  This movie wishes.

It tells the story of a group descended from cat worshippers from ancient Atlantis and Eqypt (They made the typo, I'm keeping it!), who settled on an alien world (How did they get there?) called Ceta that is running low on resources for their people.  The cat people are fighting a cosmic war against the dog people from the planet Thraxis, and they have plans to invade.

Yes, Corpse Grinders has taken the centuries long war between dogs and cats on our own planet, and turned it into the clever, scifi allegory of...a centuries long war between dogs and cats.  What this has to do with a company that makes Soylent Cat Food, only the rest of Corpse Grinders 2: The Worsening will tell.

I had higher hopes for the Beast in X-Men 3.

 As if that all wasn't bad enough, the movie gives us bad CG spaceships fighting and blasting each other that spin around so bad I think I was getting vertigo.  And then we get our first, and mercifully ony, sight of the dog people.  Big, bright blue, plastic dog masks with an underbite of doom.  Doctor Who has better aliens on his worst days.  I could spend this entire review just laughing at how awful they are.

We then jump to the cat people monitoring the battle, resplendent in their overly theatrical and gilded robes.  Oh, and they're not very catlike, besides wearing gigantic not very catlike ears stapled to their silly hats.

This local production of Cats needs some work.

As if the dog people weren't bad enough, the cat people deserve even more laughter.  First there's the not-cat ears stapled to their hats.  Or if they're not wearing hats, the ears are stapled to headbands.  On top of that is the badly painted on whiskers.  Then there's the fact that a group of them are running through some desert scrubland wearing black t-shirts and shorts like they're on vacation.  I'm not sure if they're playing, or running from danger.  It's unclear.

The best yet though, is what each and every one has on their shirt.  A giant cat head.  For reals, cat heads.  How simplistic can you get?  Can you imagine if Thor worshippers wore shirts with his mug on them, and wielding hammers?  So very on the nose, and it just screams, THEY ARE CATS GET IT.

I'm not even three minutes into this turkey, and I am already dumbfounded by what I'm seeing.  The production values in this movie are almost non-existant.  This movie manages to actually look worse than its predescessor from thirty years ago.  We've gotten better technology since then, there's no excuse, save for money, that would explain the sheer cheapness of every frame of images I'm seeing.

For some reason, the elf people have no chance for survival without finding outside resources.  Probably because they're too busy laughing at Jojo the blue-faced dog to fight back.

My mother says we can no longer use the living room for our D&D meetings, guys.

So the Cetians delcare they must find a new home, and hey!  There's this world called Earth that just might support their kind of life!  Well yes, that would be logical since you CAME FROM THERE.  Do they know their origins or not?  They know of Atlantis.  And to call people on Earth 'humanoid creatures' is just stupid, since THEY ARE YOU.

And they also feel it's worth pointing out that we don't fight dinosaurs.  Uhhh...kay?  I'm glad we don't too?  What of it?

They say they must mount an expedition to 'this place called Earth, which our history says we come from!"  Helloooo bad dialogue.  You don't call a place you come from 'some place'.  It's just awkward, if not dumb.  That's like saying the Mayflower landed on some place called Plymouth.  Our former home, Earth, would have been much better.  Almost anything would have been better.

So, the female of the trio says she will go to this place called Earth to bring back supplies, and their leader Borat pledges his life to fight for their survival.  Niiiice!

That's the only Borat joke I got in me folks, soak it in.

Ok, to be fair, his name is BorATH, but everyone kills the dipthong and just pronounces it as Borat.  So I'm running with it.  Oh, and they also sucker their third main guy to come with them, but that's unimportant, we almost never see him again.

Borat urges his people to pray to their cat gods for continued survival, and in a moment that literally had me almost falling out of my chair it made me laugh so hard, all the cat people, with their stapled on cat ears, and cat head shirts, and painted cat whiskers all bow to a panther statue and cry out a loud, long, "Meoooooow!"

Yes my lord, I shall also seek out a 'condo made of stone-a."

While Borat, Felina (Oi) and the other guy pile into their spaceship, we jump to this place called Earth, we find a semblence of normalcy after the ten minutes of WTF, as a guy is cleaning up a dishevelled office and finds the script from the first movie.

As it turns out, I'm not far off, and my jokes earlier were more accurate than I could have hoped.  The nephew of Landau, also named Landau, has stumbled upon his uncle's notes.  Not only that, but he's partenered up with Luckman Jr., or Maltby's own nephew to use his own name for a change.

Anyways, Landau seems pretty ok with trying to reuse his uncle's old plans.  At least he's bright enough (For certain values of bright) to want to stick to dead bodies, and leave the lives ones alone, since that was their uncles' downfall.  As I pointed out last review.

So, Lotus Cat Food is back in business, and using the same ingredients as before.  Ok, let's run with this scenario for just a minute.  Landau's a money-hungry little nutbar, fine.  He wants to save money, fine.  His uncle had a great idea...well, not fine, but I can go along with it for the moment.  They both acknowledge that people are well aware what their uncles and Lotus did 30 years ago.  Do they not think that someone will take a look at their food to check the ingredients, remembering what happened last time?  They might even mean it as a joke.  Just making sure, ha ha! then they actually find ground up remains in the cat food.  And won't the feline attacks start up again at coincidentally the same time as Lotus Cat Food is back on the market?  The plan is almost perfectly sound, EXCEPT FOR EVERYTHING.

Gratuitous director cameo!

 A stockholder in Lotus goes to visit the director and writer of the movie to try and secure some funding to get the cat food company off the ground.  Careful, from the looks of this movie, I don't think he has that much spare change.

Back at Soylent Cat Food, Landau slaps up a help wanted sign and lures in a bunch of drunken hobos lingering around the loading bays.  Good thing they were nearby.

I remember the fate of drunken hobos in the first movie, and don't see these guys faring any better.  But I guess they had to go this route, since killing the physically and mentally challeneged just won't fly in 2000.

Aye, tis a fine day t'be biking through the Scottish desert, laddie!

Because the movie had been just too normal, it decides to remind us of the other plot from WTFville, as we see the Cetians landing in the middle of nowhere, and just so happens to be coincidentally seen by the director of the movie.  Who just so happens to be grabbed by the men in black.

I'd complain about them coming out of nowhere in the middle of a desert to grab a guy, but they ARE the men in black, so it is kinda what they do.

While they cart the director off for crimes against good taste, we next wander over to University Medical Hospital, and come across a couple...they wouldn't, would they?  Would this movie truly continue such a contrived tradition they started with Landau and L-Maltby and bring in another Doctor Glass?

Yes.  Yes they would.  Not only that, but he's Doctor Howard Glass.  Just like the first movie, completely.

Hilariously, a receptionist walks into frame and says she's sorry, before bolting off stage left.  I really can't be sure if that was supposed to happen and it was the receptionist interupting the couple snogging, or if the actress accidentally walked into frame and ran off.  The movie is just unprofessional enough to leave that in.

Anyways, the doctors once again have a cat (Do a lot of hospitals just let their staff bring their pets to work and wander around?  Seriously.) and gasp, it just won't eat.  Gee, I bet I can guess what it will eat; human flesh!

The movie wanders from there like a drunken bum over to the offices of A.S.T.A.P.P., but they can't be bothered to tell us what that means.  The offices of Ass-tapping seem to be involved in watching for aliens, at the very least.  The director is dragged in by his MIB escorts, and people keep saying things like "they have to be brought before the asstap committe" which just kills me.

Landau has some business to attend to, so leave the none to bright Tim whom they hired to watch and feed their test cast, in charge while he's gone.  He's not the brightest crayon in the box, and the chances for corporate espionage here are just rampant.  There's no real attempt to hide stuff, competition is always looking to see what the Secret Formula is, so Landau's best choice for a guard is the guy easily distracted by shiny objects.  Great.

He heads out to Farewell Acres, the exact same cemetary from the first movie, although they seem to have fallen on harsh times.  The gate to the original cemetary was a fancy ironworks affair, with the name worked into the gate.  Now it's a chainlink rolling fence with a cardboard sign hanging off one of the rails and the name handwritten upon it.  Damn that recession.

The two owners of the cat food company chat up the old couple that take care of the cemetary, a couple named Caleb and...and Cleo?!

Wait, just...wait.

What?!

Again with the exact same names?  How lazy was Mikels in writing this that he couldn't be bothered to come up with a single new name for a reused character type from the first movie?  That is just astoundingly bad.  And this movie is full of bad, so to find something leaps and bounds above the rest is a challenge.

The script similarities are just amazing.  The couple is pretty much the same, with the same relationship.  Landau offers to pay for bodies by the pound.  Most amazing of all is that Caleb already has bodies stacked up in the house ready to go!  For days, even!

Whyyyy are they named the same, why??

It's amusing to watch bad actors trying to load fake bodies into a van and try to make it look like a struggle.

While Felina (twitch) sniffs fish at the market, Landau and Luckman head back to Lotus to fire up the corpse grinder, and...oh no, the movie is starting over again, I'm trapped in my own personal hell that will never st...no wait, just reused footage.  Phew.

At least this time they learned and had the bodies stripped naked before making them ground chuck (or ground betty!).  Although that still leaves bones and hair.  And fillings.  And anything internal.  The movie then copies the original with the shot of the ground up meat being spat out and into a waiting receptacle, which they linger on for just a little too long.

I have nothing funny to say. That hair is all the funny I need.

These goobers are following a bit too much of their uncles' plans, as they reenact the absolute worst part of it, with the specially flavoure embalming fluid.  It doesn't need to be flavoured!  Don't mention flavour!  Just say a better embalming fluid!  Flavour gives away the game!  Just sell it as...I don't know!  Fuck, just say it's greener, a less harmful pollutant!  That's a way to go, right?  No sane person would go, "Hmm, pork flavoured embalming fluid?  Why yes, I shall buy many cases of your product, because we feel it is important that our resting dead taste like cooked pig, for no particular reason!"

I'm not even going to ponder on pork-flavouring Jewish corpses.

At least the mortician has half a brain in his head and calls their plan what it is.  Landau actually has the balls to try and backtrack and say they say it's flavoured just for laughs.  Then why say it?  Why slap giant labels saying PORK FLAVOUR on the bottles?  You guys are criminals!  LIE!!  Money talks though, and the mortician is in the deal.  The guys running a cat food company, and they don't hide that fact, using the same name as the one that was closed down because the previous owners killed people and ground them up for food, come around and ask you to ADD FLAVOUR TO DEAD BODIES and he looks the other way.  Idiot!

As if that's enough, Landau then actually tries the environmental approach!  Why not start with that?  Augh!

Landau and Luckman do have one decent idea, such as it is, to harvest bodies slated for cremation.  Take the bodies, offer to burn them at a discount price, and return the urns with the ashes.  So they get paid to take bodies, and return ashes from the fireplace.  That's genius, for these guys.

Sigh.  The doctor's girlfriend?  Again named Angie.  I...I just can't.  Reread the previous rants about the names.  Although this time I could add supposition of him dating a woman with the same name as (Potentially) his mother.  Her cat gets some Lotus food, devours it, and let the killings commence.  Please?

Howard tries pulling the food away, as Angie 2.0 says the cat growls when she does that.  Except this time, when the cat fails to growl.  Oops.  It zips after the bowl to eat more, and then growls.  THEN it attacks Doctor Glass.  Did his father ever tell him about the strange cat killings in '71?

The cat attacks are no better this time around, as Glass holds the cat tight as it tries to squirm away.

Meanwhile, in the realm of insanity, Felina is still looking for food and comes across free sample giveaways in the market.  The salesperson hilariously goofs when she gives the Lotus slogan as 'for cats who love people' while gesturing at a sign behind her with the actual slogan that's 'for cats who LIKE people'.  It's a minor goof to be sure, but the words are right there!  She also demonstrates the easy to open pop top can, and the dingus in sound made the can opening sound like a can of soda.  Felina eats up the food, and steals all the cans, making a getaway.

Howard tracks down the CEO we met earlier, and he phones him up at home.  Nice of the FDA to just give that number out to anyone who asks.

Felina's walking somwhere and passes some thugs.  They see an easy mark with fancy jewlery, and are quickly taken out by Felina and the bad foley of punching that one comes to expect from this calibre of movie.

The CEO makes a trip to Doctor Director to have him analyse the cat food.  He says Glass brought up some concerns of the cat's behaviour after eating it, and wanted to talk about it, but he said he'd look into things himself.  Which is not accurate in any way, shape, or form.  No one said any of those things in that brief conversation before the cat fight.  I don't think he's lying, since he's getting the food analysed, I just think it's bad scriptwriting or editing.

Doctor Director has an assistant that tells him that the planet he's been wanting to check out will be visible soon, so they all go to see it, including the CEO.  This has nothing to do with anything, and only serves to show the professor has an interest in the stars.  The commentary revealed they only did it because one of the cast had a telescope, and the director wanted to use everything he could, so since it was there, he wastes time and film with it.

Elsewhere, Tim is still playing with cats and making fake cremations.  They're giving him a lot of power.  He's feeding the cats, keeping watch, overseeing the ashes scam, and more.  Not bad for a lowly hobo.  And I just realised that these urns he's filling up where visible in earlier scenes with Tim and the cats, long before Landau picked them up from the funeral home.

Sadly this didn't happen soon enough to stop this movie.

On the graveyard shift, Caleb 2.0 is busy gathering bodies while his wife is bugging the heck out of him, and my fondest wish is so close to being met.  Cleo 2.0 is lacking a plastic doll baby, but she does have an oversized stuffed bear she carries with her everywhere.  If only there were more scenes of it to laugh at and ease my suffering.

Because none of these characters can be anything original from their predescessors, Luckman Jr. points out that he finds one of the corpses pretty, showing a predilection for necrophilia, just like his uncle.  I could have done without that little homage and callback.  It's all becoming just a little too much to have every character be exactly like their namesakes.

Although in a surprising departure, Landau does actually pay Caleb.  And doesn't kill him for it.

Back at the offices of Tap That Ass, they get another message from Borat, but no one can understand his broken English.  Actually, he's just reiterating the Vulcan People's need for food and water.  One of the MIBs think it's just hakcers, or pranksters.  Nah, it's just Hollywood wannabes with too much free time.

One of the asstappers wants to check out Lotus before comitting to anything, and someone offers an MIB escort.  Yes, they actually call them MIBs in the movie.  Imagine what happens once Lotus shuts down?  The cat people swoop in and enslave our entire planet, turning it into a farm for their need to feast upon human flesh.  Now there's a movie.  Sadly, that movie was called Battlefield Earth.

The movie wastes more time (And thus shall I) by sending Landau to the funeral parlour to drop off urns.  The time wasting comes with a long sermon about the departed, as well as a woman starting to randomly sing Amazing Grace.  So unnecesary.

The government dude shows up at Lotus to inspect the place, but Tim won't let him in.  Go Tim!  He shows surprising intelligence by not letting him in right away.  Any old corporate spy could come around claiming to be from the government and steal the formula.

Sadly, the intelligence is short lived as Tim is pushed some more and lets him in.

Malcolm McGovernment naturally finds the corpse grinder, and the stockpile of bodies they've accumulated.  Before he can squeal though, Landau arrives and conks him on the head with a spare bone lying around, and tosses him into the machine.

Landau continues his errands and drops off more flavouring to the mortician.  He outright says they're having a run on pork, so they better increase usage.  I...I got nothin'.

The mortician seems oddly ok with it, and rambles on about cannibalism being ok in other cultures.  Yes, the movie actually tries to take a moral stance for cannibalism and human sacrifice.  Of course, it would only be cannibalism if they were grinding up cats.  I'm not sure where the cat people fall into the scale.

We interupt this movie to annoy you and make things even more nonsensical.

Just when I think this movie can't get any more insane or screwed up, Cleo is laying in bed with her baby bear, and an alien grey beams into the room.  And then he promptly disappears.  What was the point?  Seriously.  There are no greys in this movie, they're never seen again.  This one just pops in, wiggles his fingers, and goes.  The only point is to make Cleo scream so loud that Caleb executionals her by choking.  He says she killed herself, presumably with a heart attack, but I doubt a jury will buy it.  That's not what it looked like to this viewer!

Doctor Director reports his findings with the cat food to Bob the CEO, and there's definitely some odd ingredients like nicotine and alcohol.  He doesn't say anything conclusive until he hangs up the phone and blurts out these things are only found in human flesh.  I dunno, you might find nicotine in those smoking moneys.

Apparently he's forgotten how phones work.  You say the important stuff *before* hanging up, not after.

I don't think that came from a human, guys.

 More MIBs show up at Lotus, looking for their missing colonel, but they get sent packing.  They really didn't put up much of a fight.  They get told nope, ain't seen him, and go away.  Not your typical goon squad there.

Luckman Jr. is worried about what to do if they return, and Landau's solution is to just kill them too.  Oh well, so much for not repeating your uncles' mistakes.  This is precisely repeating their mistakes.  More than that, this is making the mistakes worse, by the people you want to kill being government stooges!

I could see killing the random bum, but government employees tend to go noticed when they're missing.  The dumb, it burns.

I don't care if you're the director, I am not a hat rack!

 Director Doctor heads to a colleague at a university to inquire about cannibalism, and he makes some pretty good references to other incidents; plane crashes like "Alive", people trapped in underground caves and having to eat someone to survive like the classic novelty song, "Timothy", and people eating others while getting lost on trails in the old west that makes me think of Alfred Packer, even if I know they mean the Donner party.  He wants to get a grant so he can continue his studies.  Studies into what, I don't know, but they seem willing to go along with it.

Meanwhile back at the offices of Grab Ass, Borat has struck a deal with the White House for cultural exchange to make benefit and get cat food, and been given permission to access whatever funds they need to buy Lotus.  I wonder how often this happens.  Some aliens swoop down, want to buy Microsoft...

Continuing the mistakes of their uncles, Landau tries to hire on some goons to go out and kill people for them.  There's some great haggling over the price of a life, but they eventually can't come to an agreement, so the goons leave.  Yes, the people who you just tried to pay to kill people, are just let go.  That's bright.

Angie can't get her cat to eat anything but Lotus, and again there's none on the shelves, so she gets the address and heads down to the factory to try and get a case straight from the source.  Yes, they took the investigative plot from the first movie and redid it, but this time for real, and not just a cover story.

I don't like these new American Idol judges.

Thrill as the movie movie takes us to an exciting stockholders' meeting to discuss the sale of Lotus to the alien cat people!  Amaze at the backroom dealings of a buyout!  Snore at none of that really being that exciting!

For an alien that had never even heard of that place called Earth, Felina sure whips up a proposal for a buyout pretty damned fast, and I can only presume that it's well written, and legal.  I've lived on this planet for a few decades and couldn't do that.

Landau swings back by Caleb the Sequel's place to grab more bodies, and it's little more than an excuse to revisit Classic Caleb's line, "No money, no meat!"  He even gets Cleo's body in the sale, for the same fifty bucks as the rest of them.  I would've charged a little extra for a family member.  Heck charge a handling fee for having killed her!

The stock meeting didn't go well, with the freakshow of stockholders refusing to sell, expecting to make millions of dollars on their investment.  Boy, are they in for a surprise when they learn about the secret ingredient.

The fuzzy-eared ones aren't worried though, since they'll just create an infinite amount of money by changing lead into gold with their mastery of alchemy they just pulled out of their asses.

Poor Tim.  He was doing pretty good, but when Angie shows up at Lotus, he says he can't let her in because something bad happened to the last guy he let in.  Oops.

My uncle taught me everything I know about kidnapping girls.

Angie follows in her namesake's heels and sneaks around Lotus.  And it ends exactly the same way with Luckman Jr. sneaking up behind her and grabbing.  He did a much better job of it though.

She wakes back up and thinks she must have fainted because she is such a girl, and does that all the time.  Sigh, so much for feminism.

Angie was caught before she saw anything, so Landau is agreeable to give her some cat food, and even offers her a tour.  Because the first thing you want to do with the person you were afraid of seeing things she shouldn't, is to show her around.

One of the hired hobos stumbles into the backroom.  Because we haven't revisited that beat from the original yet, it's his turn to get fed through the blades o' death.

Angie gets her cat food, and while loading it into her car, we're treated to a classic mistake of bad movie making, as the wind whooshing around outside is clearly picked up by the mic.

As she leaves triumphant and alive, the Goons in Black return to tell Landau and friends that they have been authorised to buy their cat food on behalf of an alien entity.  Seriously, it's like two movies going on at once here, and neither of them makes a lick of sense.

We finally learn that ASTAPP stands for Awareness Supression To Avoid Public Panic.  Yeah, that's not a needlessly complex name to get a forced acronym at all.  They place an order for 400 cases, and offer up a 10k cash advance on the order.  That's gonna be a lotta dead bodies.  Actually, they could use that money and do shit legitamitely, but that would make sense.

Luckman Jr. says that it could take them awhile to fill the order, and Landau replies with the assinine comment that with the money they should be able to DIG up some extra help.  You could almost let it slide if he didn't overemphasize the word, and give a knowing nod and laugh to his partner while the goon squad is sitting right there.

They try to figure out how they're going to get everything done, and consider going back to the thugs from earlier, but Luckman Jr. wants to keep things on the up and up.  When you grind up dead bodies THERE IS NO UP AND UP.  It is all down from that point.

Oh wait, another beat from the original movie; Maltby wanting to share the cash.  Check that box on the list.

Cue the exciting phonecall montage as everyone gets their ducks in a row.  It even lands on Caleb who can only dig so fast, so hires on some extra guys, the kind that can't talk or hear.  So we will be exploiting the challenged.  Another tickbox.  Except not really, because we finally see the two he hired, and they're perfectly normal.

Corpse Grinders is proud to announce their newest sponsor, Lite Brite!

As they go through another lengthy montage of grinding up bodies, they finally feed in Cleo who Wasn't Really Dead and wakes up screaming mere seconds before she is really dead and ground up.  I'd ask what the point was, but my ability to care has been drained.

Once they've made all the cat food they need, they call up the Asstappers, and the goon squad beams in.  Seriously.  Just like the random alien in Cleo's room.  Does that mean the alien was real?  I really don't know anymore.

Why didn't the MIBs just beam in at any other time in the movie?  Or better yet, why are they doing it now?  They're supposed to be minimising panic, right?  Keeping quiet about aliens?  But these guys blurt out they work for aliens, and teleport here and there without a care.  Good job, guys!  My tax dollars at work!

This really reeks of just wanting to get the Corpse Grinders 2: The Squeakual over with, and just having people teleport around to cut to the chase.  Which still leave the random bedroom grey, but whatever.

Get your own MIB aquarium decorations today.

The Lotusians start loading up cat food and carting it to the delivery location, and after a lengthy sequence of them lugging boxes around, it too gets the bubbly beaming treatment.  Now this time I really must ask...why not just beam the food from wherever it was in the first place?  Saves everyone the headache from carrying all those boxes part way.  It's not like it's a secret.

All the military personal on site get reminded and warned that they've been sworn to secrecy.  Hey, here's an idea, what about the guys you've been teleporting in front of?  You know, the civilians?  Why not secrecy with them?  Or swear THEM to secrecy as well?  For a group so intent on keeping things secret, they really do suck at it.

So, Landau, Luckman, and Lotus get their payment for the food.  The cat people get the food they need.  Angie got her food for her cat.  Doctor Director goes off with the aliens into the stars to study cannibalism (I think).  Everyone got what they wanted?  And yet nothing really happens to anyone.  There are no consequences.  The hell.

So many, "What was the point of...?" questions I could ask.

But thanks to the aliens for taking Ted V. Mikels off our hands.  Let him make bad movies on Ceta for awhile.

And yes, the movie does seriously end that way.  The dog aliens never come up again, we never find out how their invasion plans went.  How long can 400 cases of cat food cans really keep an entire race of people fed?  Will it make them into crazy attacking people that feed on their own?  Will they eat Ted V. Mikels?  Will Ted become the official cleaner of Borat's litter box?

But the biggest screw you this movie gives to the viewers is with Lotus.  They dig up how many people?  They kill how many people?  They murder a government agent?  And they get away with it completely.  They even get rewarded for it with giant piles of cash.  There is zero comeuppance for them, and things actually end up great for the psychotic murderers.  Couldn't this have been done with any old cat food company that didn't kill people?  If you're not going to do anything with that plotline?  What sort of message does this send?  Aside from a message of pain.

Sigh.  Can we wrap this up and jump to...

THE RUNDOWN

Video: Oh good, we can.  This movie, made in 2000, is somehow worse than its 30 year old predecessor.  It's filmed on video camera a lot of the time, and looks like it's filmed in someone's den half the time.  It's also in full frame and not widescreen which increases the amatuerish feel to it.  Just a bad, bad looking movie.  Couple that with how cheap the lighting is, with tons of shadows, make me think they've learned nothing in 30 years.  It looks like somone's homemade movie, in every way.

Audio: Also pretty bad.  Most everything can be heard, but the audio was low, and they recorded a lot of the background stuff a more professional unit would get rid of or protect against.

Special Features: Again, a commentary with Ted V. Mikels narrating the action, with a few interesting tidbits.  Not bad, and mildly entertaining, but gets dull when he's just repeating what is on the screen.

Best Line: "They fight like dogs!"  Go ahead, guess who that was said about.  If you said the dog people, give yourself a gold star.  But there's a lot of silly lines in this movie, that one just stood out as the super silliest.

First Kill: 50 minutes in, when Maltby shoves the colonel into the grinder.

Blood Type: Actually, I can't recall much blood at all, which is a shame.  A little gore could have livened this turkey up.

Sex Appeal: These are not the droids you're looking for.  Nothing here to see, no saving grace of titilation, outside of Angie being cute.

Movie Rating: Corpse Grinders is one of the worst movies I've seen.  I never thought I'd see anything that bad for a good, long time.  And then I came across Corpse Grinders 2: The Final Nightmare.  There is nothing good here.  Even less than its predescessor.  You just stare at the screen for 100 minutes trying to make sense of the assault upon your eyes that is hitting you.  This movie goes nowhere, is random as hell, throws everything in that makes no sense, and it is very much the original movie's script reused - especially names! - and then with an added side movie with aliens on the side.  This movie gets a one out of five cat ears.

Entertainment Rating: Now, that being said...the sheer horror you feel while watching this flick is not to be missed.  Sit down with friends to watch this trash and have even more fun.  You will howl endlessly at everything this movie pulls out of its butt, and how bad and cheesy it all looks.  It is way more entertaining than the first, even with zero real cat attacks.  Those would have made this movie unmissable, but they left them out almost entirely, so.  The sequel outdoes the original and gets four out of five recycled names out of five.

My brain hurts.