 RABID GRANNIES (1988) Dir. Emmanuel Kervyn, 89 mins 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.    |
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