The Corpse Grinders II (2000) - 2/4

This review has since become outdated. Some reviewers, like Roger Ebert, refuse to reconsider their old opinions. I'm different. A reappraisal can be found here:


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Unbelievable is the word that first comes to mind. I couldn't believe what I was seeing most of the time. The plot is more or less The Corpse Grinders all over again, with some bonkers subplots involving Cat People from planet Ceta who desperately need food, the Men in Black who have been charged with finding the best catfood for planet Ceta in the interest of diplomacy, and Ted V Mikels as an astronomy professor who owns a share in Lotus Cat Foods and is in the know on alien visitations.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2615/4095271374_07b59c0817.jpg - Some cat people. Yeah, that's not embarrassing.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2643/4095271430_ffdf5f653e.jpg - Here's another one. Ted's wife. Smelling a fish.

Oh yeah, there are Dog People from Planet Traxis. They show up briefly at the beginning to make you laugh.
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The runtime of The Corpse Grinders II is 1 hour and 42 minutes. Over an hour of that is spent on the minutia of running a cat food business. The Corpse Grinders II: Cat Food Tycoon. You get board meetings about whether to sell cat food wholesale to the cat people and see all the board members, slowly, each giving their explanations for their vote, saying "Nope." Then the President of the USA says, "Give them cat food." So the board meeting scene was for nothing. We see Landau and Maltby (the owners of Lotus Cat Foods) hiring employees, discussing business plans, buying the vans they need.

In the meantime, the mysterious professor Mikels arranges to get a grant for some scholarship on cannibalism. And two doctors are attacked by their Lotus-eating cat and try to buy some catfood--successfully, without incident; it's just a red herring. Oh, and a Grey alien appears out of nowhere, causes a 74-year-old Liz Renay wearing only negligee to shriek and flail about in bed until she dies, then disappears and is never seen or heard from again.
BEFORE: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2426/4095271312_30c76d18c6.jpg
AFTER: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2751/4094511411_acf8a4f7c2.jpg

Almost everything in this film is a red herring, except for the business planning stuff. The whole film is basically about how to run a pet food company. Nothing happens. A big shipment for cat food comes in from planet Ceta; Landau and Maltby have to scramble to make the order in time; they do; end of movie.

The one person who figures out that they're putting people in the cat food decides to become a cannibal and flies off to planet Ceta. Sorry to ruin the film for you if you haven't seen it, but in all fairness, I think Mikels ruined it for you himself.

As drive-in moviemakers of the '60s had a certain revival of interest in the '80s and some became known as drive-in classics, a lot of them stopped worrying about the Hollywood success they probably knew they'd never get and just began making movies for their fanbase. This allowed them ample time to get weirder and weirder, because fans of such movies will eat up just about anything. This is the case with Mikels. He's been making movies since the '50s. He has his fanbase and they like what he does. This is a movie made for Mikels fans and partially by Mikels fans I bet. So there you go.

One thing I especially liked in the movie is her:
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I think she's really pretty, and not in that assembly-line-beauty way.

And some of the lines: "On planet earth, they don't fight dinosaurs and yet they fight each other." Excuse me?
And about the Dog People: "They fight like dogs."

I'll leave it up to you the reader to figure out if this is a positive or negative review.