Deathgasm II Goremageddon
A key character arc in Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm (2015) was teenage protagonist Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) realising that his older rebel bandmate Zakk (James Blake), who he idolises, is a selfish bastard who consistently undermines him and is in the end rotten enough to become host to a world-threatening demon. This ten-years-later sequel rather oddly forgets that – when Zakk and D&D loser Dion (Sam Berkley) are raised from their graves as rotting, gut-munching zombies, all that business is forgotten in favour of gags about a zombie who wants to go vegan and a zombie who collects severed penises and wants to take over the world with a fairly thin horde of shambling clods.
What’s something of a downer, in the way The World’s End or It’s Always Fair Weather are disillusioned follow-ups to Shaun of the Dead and On the Town, is that any progress Brodie made in the earlier film is wiped off the map. Dumped by his girlfriend Medina (Kimberley Crossman), who has joined a ‘heart metal’ group fronted by total a-hole Jesse (Kieran Charnock), now thirtyish Brodie is in a slump, on benefits which a sadistic Christian social security minion wants to cut, and now thinks his spell with DEATHGASM (a band) was the best part of his life. He digs out the ‘Black Hymn’ to raise his old bandmates so he can compete in a contest which he imagines will wind up with him getting back together with Medina. Deathgasm II is the story of a loser who is so affronted that a woman has dared to leave him he performs a ritual he knows could have dire consequences – and directly or indirectly causes the deaths of a couple of hundred innocent people (and some drummers). His only living friend is Giles (Daniel Cresswell), a drummer who lost his arm to a demon, and his only actual companion is a metalhead dog who gets eaten as soon as the zombies are about.
It’s beside the point to mention that this is a bad taste orgy of gross-out gags, since that’s pretty much what it said on the tin – I’m not sure if it was to do with the general atmos of FrightFest’s haunted Screen 2, but the auditorium was eerily free of laughter for the whole film. It may be that there are really very few taboo subjects in splat-com and they’ve all been exhausted so it doesn’t matter how much poo, piss, blood, cum, brain matter, slime, rot and porridge you spill the audience has seen it all before. The set-pieces – like the glory-hole sequence in which Giles mangles, severs, hammers and slices multiple penises – are all so contrived they tend to get ho-hum reactions from horrorheads these days. Strangely, what works – and I’ve always felt The World’s End and It’s Always Fair Weather had something important to say – is Cawthorne’s characterisation and performance. It’s a risk to make someone who used to be an underdog hero into a whining narcissist who still presumes everyone will see him as who he used to be and give him a pass – and a bigger risk to build a comedy around a character who is basically impossible to like, though Brodie is also horribly believable amid a cast of gurning cartoons.
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