Yummy Is Just as Delicious as You Hoped It Would Be
I know I drive this home a lot, but I am a massive fan of body horror. I write about it, I sit around thinking about it and I corner people at parties to chat their ear off about Reanimator and From Beyond. Since the ‘90s, body horror cinema has transitioned from using special fx, puppetry and corn syrup to CGI in kill scenes and corporeal transformations. I’m not a fan of CGI – it removes the realism of the exploding head and creates a strong delineation between what is real and what isn’t, which disturbs the psychological effects that watching zombies tear David apart in Shaun of the Dead has on the audience. This is all to say I am always on the lookout for body horrors that go old school, throwback to the ‘80s and really get their hands dirty using sheep guts over weird CGI intestines. To put it plainly, my love of sheep guts as a replacement for human guts led me to one of the best body horrors of 2019, Lars Damoiseaux’s Yummy, a horror-comedy Shudder original.
Spoilers ahead.
Yummy is an on-the-edge-of-your-seat blood-soaked zombie adventure. From the get-go, the film uses smart and classy shock value to prepare you for the mayhem that continuously escalates throughout the film, and it is chaotic in the best way possible. Within the first ten minutes, as Michael (Bart Hollanders), his girlfriend Alison (Maaike Neuville) and her mother Sylvia (Annick Christiaens) are on their way to an obscure, affordable (and seemingly illegal) plastic surgery clinic in the middle of nowhere, you get a bit of blood and guts.
Michael, who is constantly at odds with Alison’s mother, runs over a small animal. It’s gruesome, as the completely eviscerated animal is still breathing. As he proceeds to put it out of its misery, another car runs it over, splattering Michael with blood. Michael then has one of the most ‘dramatic pukes’ I have ever seen, outside of demonic possession pukes of course. We learn later that Michael is a med-school drop out with hemophobia, the irrational fear of blood, making the story even more amusing. I am not going to give you a proper summary of the film as I think its far more exciting to go into as blindly as I did. However, I will give you a Joe Bob Briggs style list of wild kills and grotesque happenings.
In the film, you will see:
One lipless zombie
One brutal axe to the head
Three Zombieland style double taps
One severed arm in a paper shredder
One frozen penis
One cute, flesh-eating frog-like creature
Roughly 4 rooms covered in sheep intestine
One liposuction tummy tuck gone painfully wrong
And these are just the tip of the iceberg.
If you can stomach any or all of these, this film is for you. This movie is brilliantly disgusting, and I spent the entire duration pumped as hell - the adrenaline rush it gave me led me to consider flipping a car with my bare hands. I didn’t.
I so badly want to reveal the end of the movie, but that’s one spoiler I definitely can’t give away. All I will say is that the ending is 10/10 and I was not dissatisfied in the least.
Aside from the film being an absolute bloody-banger, I also appreciated the feminist commentary on unattainable body images and the standards to which women are held to achieve the look of the ‘ideal’ woman. This is not to say that I think that one of the repercussions of beauty body modification is a full blown zombie attack, but the film has a strong focus on the psychological effects that things like cat-calling, false beauty standards and the male gaze have on women.
In the beginning of the film, Alison is perpetually hounded by men in passing cars, in the street and even by both her mother and the plastic surgeon, who can’t fathom why she would want a breast reduction. Almost all of Alison’s conversations with Michael revolve around her breasts, and whether he will still love her after her reduction. Surprisingly, the film doesn’t have gratuitous or exploitative frontal nudity, a classy choice, and I was expecting a lot of that. By the end of the film it is clear that Alison could not give a single rolling donut about what anyone thinks of her body – if anything boosts your confidence, it’s annihilating a bunch of rabid, post-op flesh eaters.
I cannot express how much I loved this film. It is reminiscent of classic Romero, but on speed. It’s like Dawn of the Dead, Zombieland and Crank made a baby and forced you to hold it at a party. I yelled at the television numerous times, non-stop toward the end, and I’m not big on chatting to inanimate objects. I never scream when I’m watching a horror film, or anything for that matter, aside from the Great British Bake Off (I will never forget Alaska Gate), but I screamed at this out of pure and unapologetic joy. If you are going to watch anything this week, watch Yummy, but unless you’re a creep like me, you probably shouldn’t eat while you watch it.
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