Well, all good things must come to an end, and here we are at the epic conclusion of Tro-March. And after the joys of killer condoms and rabid grannies, I’m going to stick to the familiar today with a second visit to Tromaville for Class of Nuke Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown. I enjoyed the first one fine – without it really rocking my world – and honestly I was expecting more of the same here. Honestly because this was a sequel I thought this would probably be a little worse, but I was rather proven wrong here. In fact, much to my surprise, I enjoyed this one mightily.

Nuke Em High II picks up a number of years after the huge explosion that took out both the Tromaville Nuclear Facility, and the nearby high school, but never fear – both have been rebuilt, strangely enough within the same premises – because why not incorporate those two things together? Our story follows ace (school newspaper) reporter Roger Smith, a buff surfer guy also looking to get laid at every turn, to no avail I should add. The school itself is even more crazy than the previous film, and it almost feels better for going that much more extravagant. One of the things for me that makes this film an improvement on part one is its wry and self-knowing humour – Troma pokes plenty of fun at itself here, and that sort of fourth-wall breaking has always been something I’ve enjoyed in movies.

Anyway, deep inside the nuclear plant, the dean and an evil professor are building up a race of subhumanoids – mostly distinguished apart from humans by the additional mouth they have where their bellybuttons should be. Our intrepid lead Roger Smith falls for Victoria after taking part in an – ahem – ‘experiment’, and when everything goes to hell again at Tromaville High School he’s determined to save his beloved. And what exactly is it they’re under the most threat from? Why, a giant toxic squirrel of course!

As I mentioned earlier, this for me feels like a better movie than the first one all round. It is shot a bit cheaper, admittedly, but it really goes all out. I accused the first of pushing that bit too hard, true, but this one sticks the landing by being a much funnier movie and also having a plot that makes sense throughout and setting up all of its key points. Sure, it’s not exactly Shakespeare – we’ll save that one for Tromeo and Juliet – but it at least does all the fundamentals of a plotline right. I loved Brick Bronksy in the lead as Roger Smith, who was absolutely perfect as the dumb blonde with the big ambitions, a perfect epitome of the 80s flipping over into the 90s. For me this is going to be a movie with more memorable moments than its predecessor, so it’s bound to score more.

That’s not to say the movie is without criticisms – some of its montages feel ultimately pointless, and some of the side performances are not all they might have been. The dean’s voice grates on me horribly – although it’s doubtless meant to. But generally these are minor quibbles in a film that never took itself too seriously and delivered a lot of wry smiles and some flat-out belly laughs too. It’s one of those very rare instances where the sequel improves on the first, and now I’m thinking I probably have to complete the trilogy at some point…

RATING: 7.5/10. I can’t go nuts on a rating for this one, as it doesn’t reinvent the wheel or make me think differently about anything, but I had a lot of fun and that counts for plenty. It does a better job of making sense – and that is still important even in a weird gross-out comedy like this – and the main performances were far more likeable here than the one that kicked off the trilogy. I’ll be happy to head back to school if the third one can deliver at this sort of level – and that review will be coming some time soon I’m sure. It’s more of a B grade for this one at 7.5/10.

Tro-March continues on apace as we come to one of the label’s better-known movies – maybe only behind the likes of Tromeo and Juliet, The Toxic Avenger and Sgt Kabukiman NYPD – in the form of Class of Nuke Em High. The title in many ways tells you what you’re about to get into, and this one was obviously a hit because we were later treated to two sequels, which is not really all that common where it comes to Troma-land. This one is co-directed by the living legend that is Lloyd Kaufman himself, so this one ought to be absolutely Troma-riffic. So let’s take our seats ready for the school bell, shall we?

Class of Nuke Em High takes place at Tromaville High School, and before I move on I have to say how much I’ve always loved this fictional city of Tromaville. Someone ought to upon up an amusement park or an attraction or something that allows you to tour Tromaville. That can’t just be me, right? What a visitor attraction that would be somewhere over in the US…

Anyway, Tromaville High School is of course filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful characters, with goths, punks, rockers, jocks and many more exaggerated character types besides. The story in the main follows Chrissy and Warren, two of the cooler kids at school and long-time girlfriend and boyfriend. However neither wants to make the first move in the bedroom stakes, much to the amusement and consternation of their respective friends. Their main antagonists are a group of biker punks who do a nice sideline in selling weed at the school. But who provides it, I hear you cry? Well, their supplier is none other than the nearby nuclear power plant – and when they promise their buyers an atomic high, they really mean it. And from here the story descends into the sort of madness you might expect from Troma, and the school finds itself the very epicentre of a nuclear outbreak…

It’s hard to be too critical when you knowingly walk into a b-movie – after all, I can’t say that Class of Nuke Em High hasn’t delivered what it said on the tin. But there are good b-movies, and bad b-movies, and OK b-movies, and this one probably falls into that latter category. For me it takes a little while before we really get the ball rolling with the genuinely off-the-wall stuff, and sometimes it just feels like it’s trying a bit too hard to be totally outrageous and overblown. Some scenes do just feel eminently random, and add very little rather than showing off a particular effect. There’s a very strange moment in the middle with a miscarriage subplot that feels totally out of place in a horror comedy, and just jolted me out of things for a while. As the story wears on, I also feel like I don’t fully know quite why any of this stuff is happening – it’s a cavalcade of bizarre visuals and effects, sure, and if you just switch your brain off completely you can get plenty out of it. But I wasn’t quite immersed enough to fully do that, so that nitpicky, critical bit of me was still finding holes here and there. Class of Nuke Em High certainly isn’t toxic waste, but it’s not the finest offering Troma ever put out either.

RATING: 5.5/10. There is some fun to be had here, but it feels like everyone involved is trying that little bit too hard. When we looked at Killer Condom that felt like it made more sense all along, and things felt like they fit within the world of that story. Nuke Em High seems to be so obsessed with grossing you out/and or making you laugh that it throws a lot of other stuff out to achieve that, and I think that with a bit more restraint (does that sound ridiculous when you bear in mind I’m talking about a Troma movie?) would have helped this one along immensely. There’s nothing to ruin your day, or frustrate your horribly, but having watched it recently I’m already finding it’s not going to live awfully long in the memory. So it’s a middling C grade for this one at 5.5/10.

We’re back again for the second instalment of Tro-March, and we kicked off rather impressively with the wild but tremendously fun Killer Condom. Can Tro-March continue at this sort of lofty standard, or have we rather set ourselves up for a fall?

The short answer is yes. Yes, we have.

Today’s offering has no less great a title, and once I get the ball rolling I did recall having watched this movie some years back, rented on an honest to goodness VHS while I was at University. This was back in the day when it was 5 videos for 5 pound for a week – heady days for those of you with a long enough memory. If I remember right, it featured as part of a horror movie all-nighter, which might explain why I could call some bits to mind but not others. I’m sure even the most hardened of all-nighters-goers has a little nod off somewhere along the way. Unfortunately the title is absolutely the best thing about Rabid Grannies – after the title card it’s all rather downhill.

Rabid Grannies is the story of a family of grasping, clutching types of all stripes who attend a 92nd birthday party for the grande dames of the family. The familial connections were never totally clear to me, but rest assured everyone feels they have some sort of claim to a juicy inheritance, which is the sole reason they’ve attended. There’s about half an hour of setting them up, but it’s largely done in less time than that and you could have made this shorter on that alone. We also see a little of the staff at the house, and I have a sense these opening moments are meant to make us care something about their fate. I don’t think you’re meant to root for them, more rejoice in them getting killed off one by one, but it didn’t even elicit that from me as an emotional response. It was just hard to care about anything all told.

Anyway, it’s at this 30 minute or so mark that a mysterious gift gets dropped off, and when the grannies open it up they turn… well, rabid. It’s not rabid strictly, more demonically possessed, but they start by swiftly swallowing up one of their guests, and the remaining runtime is a sort of frantic chase through the vast house (which in reality is a castle somewhere in Belgium) as the family tries to escape the vengeful nature of the possessed matriarchs. In fact, speaking of matriarchs, it occurred to me that the movie has all but the same plot as The Matriarch – which I honestly far preferred. Maybe that comparison made me feel more unfavourable to Rabid Grannies, but this one falls short on a lot of fronts. The acting is terrible, and the lousy dubbing from the original French does little to help on that front. It feels inadvertently comic at times. It’s never explained what actually happened to the ‘Rabid Grannies’ for them to turn the way they did, and that would have helped the story along mightily. There are character arcs of sort in place, but they honestly feel like an afterthought there. Given some more weight they might have leant something, but as is this is just a whole lot of screaming and blood and mess. There’s just nothing much to invest in as a viewer, and I can only award this a couple of points for the odd interesting moment.

RATING: 2.5/10. I said last week there are good b-movies and bad b-movies, and sadly Rabid Grannies lands itself in that second camp. This one seems to eschew plot for the most part in favour of a series of loosely linked deaths featuring character it’s impossible to care about. I think I’m meant to hate them, but I didn’t even get to a point of feeling that – if it was even the intention. And to top it all off, the grannies of the title are not even rabid at all! Talk about false advertising… there’s nothing here that you won’t have seen done better before or since elsewhere, so this one lands a pretty poor 2.5/10.

Welcome to Tro-March!

I made it a New Year’s resolution at the start of 2021 to serve up more themed months for Film Gutter this year, and in that spirit I bring you Tro-march! It actually amazed me looking back the Film Gutter output over six years just how few Troma films I’d ever taken a look at – there was Combat Shock, and as far as I can figure that’s it. Which for a movie studio specialising in low-budget, cult and often b-movie horror is pretty surprising. So throughout March I will be doing something to redress that balance with four Troma reviews, kicking off with a look at Killer Condom.

It’s well acknowledged I’m a sucker for a quirky or interesting title, so Killer Condom drew me in immediately on those grounds. It’s in German but set in New York – whyever not? – which provides a little bit of an obstacle in the early going, but if you can push past that barrier this one has some value to it.

The story follows grizzled, gay New York cop Luigi Mackeroni, who is of Italian descent (the name is a hint, of course) and often cruises the gay club and bar scene in the area. It’s there he meets young Billy, and an unlikely romance is struck up – until their first liaison is broken up by a killer condom munching off one of Luigi’s testicles. Of course his police chief and his partner are incredulous at the suggestion, but for Luigi this has become deeply personal. And when more and more of those violent prophylactics begin emerging into the streets and places of New York, something has to be done – and Luigi is the man to bring the madness to an end, uncovering a plot that runs far deeper than anyone would have expected…

I can’t pretend that this one isn’t silly in the extreme, but there’s plenty that I found likeable about it. The lead performance by Udo Samel is hilarious, and he hams up the jaded police officer routine delightfully. The whole police environment in the movie is played for laughs to, being toxicly masculine to the point of parody. The terrifying condoms themselves do look OK effects-wise, bearing in mind this movie is now 25 years old, and of course that central concept provides a few chuckles here and there too. If you’re a fun of ridiculous and overblown B-movies and creature features, you’re bound to get something out of this one.

With that said, there are some criticisms I would level. The finale of the movie – while pretty wild to look at – feels a little undercooked in terms of its set-up and comes rather out of nowhere. It’s also not a movie I would really have expected to be 107 minutes long – it feels like the sort of B-movie you could easily blow through in less than 90, and I feel like you could have trimmed some of the smaller subplots to make this tighter and leaner. It’s also maybe a bit uneasy with some of its stereotypes – the Russian mad scientist, the religious zealot and some more besides. I also can’t comment on how accurate its depiction of the gay club and bar scene in New York is, but one or two of those moments didn’t sit quite right.

But if you can leave those things aside, Killer Condom is probably one of the better Troma offerings I’ve seen – there is an art to the B-movie for sure, and this one nails an awful lot of it. It’s a fine starting point for Tro-march – and next week we’ll be coming to take a look at a similarly fabulously titled film in Rabid Grannies.

RATING: 8/10. This one is a fun little poke at the hardened cop movie, throwing in an element so ridiculous and unbelievable as to be naturally comic. The performances are generally pretty strong, and for all its taking the Michael it feels to me like this movie has a good heart. Silly in droves, but it’s energetic and entertaining and there are plenty of b-movies much worse out there. This one gets a snappy 8/10 from me.