User Reviews

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there existed a mystical land known as The Early 90's, where there was no such thing as the internet thus no way of finding out if such-and-such movie was any good before watching it for oneself. So a young gorehound like me would rent movies based solely on the coolness of the title and cover. It's a habit that's stuck with me quite a bit. Show me a DVD where the front cover has a pic of a badass looking demon munching on a severed arm, entitled 'Severed Arm Eating Demon Badasses', and you'd better believe I will watch the unholy sh!t out of that sucker without hesitation. Of course, sometimes they turn out to be rubbish but them's the risks. Last night's gamble was 'Rabid Grannies', a movie I've wanted to see for a while because it's called 'Rabid Grannies' and has 2 rabid grannies on the cover.

It starts out with a whole bunch of extended family travelling to their 2 rich old aunties' mansion for their birthday. Quite a varied list of characters they are too - a family of four, a fat slob and his trophy wife, a virgin, an arms dealer, a suave Don Juan, 2 lesbians, a priest... If this lot all walked into a bar, it'd be one hell of a complicated joke. The character introductions are quite lengthy but an early glimpse of boob kept my spirits up, plus I figured hey, large cast = large bodycount, right? So a package arrives from the black sheep of the family who became an outcast when he got involved with a satanic cult. The package is opened, a weird fog comes out and the grannies get infected by some kind of curse.

Now's when things should get good, but I couldn't help but be a little disappointed. For starters, the grannies don't become rabid, they transform into wisecracking demons. 'Wisecracking Demons' is a quality title in its own right, and I would definitely watch that film, but I kinda had my hopes up to see some rabid grannies. I thought there'd be tons of flesh-eating going on too, but there's very little. There's some decent and amusing kills (including a great scene where the demons offer the priest a sadistic ultimatum), but it's fairly light on the gore. One scene in particular was obviously trimmed.

I found out afterwards that the DVD has much of the gore cut out because that's how the filmmaker preferred it. A director who thinks a gorefest is improved by having LESS gore?!? Me and this guy would not get along.

Consider my 5/10 a temporary score, until I eventually see it uncut.

OK this will be quick and to the point.

2 elderly aunts are having a birthday get- together with a bunch of family members who can't stand each other and can't wait for the 2 old birds to die so they can claim the inheritance.

One particular family member either wasn't invited or just couldn't be bothered coming but they decide to forward a gift anyway.

The gift is basically an empty and unremarkable wooden box; the kind you generally find in a souvenir store. While at the party and just after blowing out the candles, the box starts to emit a cloudy vapour, which no one notices, and somehow infects the 2 goblets of wine being used by the 2 aunts.

The aunts drink the tainted wine, (they don't turn rabid), they are in fact possessed and they set about killing the party goers in various ways.

It all takes a while to get going and when it does it's pretty much a "what the hell is going on" kind of thing. It's too stupid to be interesting and the English over dubbing gets annoying after a while. You'll be doing yourselves a favour if you give this a big miss.

RABID GRANNIES is a very low budget gross-out comedy from Belgium, unless you happen to watch the American version put out by Troma, in which case it's merely a comedy as all of the gore has been excised, weirdly, from their version. The story is set in one of those old dark houses where a couple of grannies receive a cursed present and transform into demons which then proceed to slaughter the assembled relatives. As a film it feels a little like Peter Jackson's BRAINDEAD albeit not as good, but without the rubbery gore effects this is merely incoherent nonsense, and completely pointless to watch.

If this had been made in America a decade later, I could see this made with the top choices of the plethora of great elderly actresses: Cloris Leachman and Betty White, or Shirley MacLaine and Olympia Dukakis, or perhaps even musicalized with Elaine Stritch and Barbara Cook. Maybe in 1988, Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn as the kindly sisters who end up flesh craving zombies, and surrounded by a cast of veteran character actors who fill out the plot of a genre once known as barnstormers or the old dark house movie.

But the cast here is filled with Belgian actors, fortunately dubbed, ranging from the two old ladies who come back from the dead when poisoned by a greedy nephew through an ancient curse, and they want the family over for dinner, not as guests but as the main course. So yes, this is a bad taste horror comedy where the acting is pretty bad even though the setting of the Belgian countryside is stunning. The film has a ton of slow moments where the actors dubbing the actual stars speak in a hideous monotone. But when the gruesome moments show up, they provide quite a few laughs. Unfortunately it wears out its welcome very quickly with cheap effects and no real scares. So it's a mixed bag among the old bags and the hateful family where everything literally seems to go to pot.

Referring to "Rabid Grannies" as it being a great movie would be a crime against all forms of good taste, but it's nevertheless a film that every horror-loving Belgian should be sincerely proud of! Our very own demented splatter flick, yay! And, all prejudices of myself being Belgian aside, one of the most entertaining splatter flicks of the entire 80's decade! If you manage to track down a fully uncut version (loads of copies suffer from severe censorship, despite the rights being owned by Troma Productions), you will be exposed to outrageous gore, absurd characters and over-the-top situations. Screw build up of tension and story lines that make sense! Acting performances, continuity or editing aren't important neither and we definitely don't care about decent dubbing jobs! All that matters here is insanity and GORE! The Remington family members all gather at their spinster aunts' mansion for a birthday celebration. They all hate each other, and the old bags even more, but there's quite an immense fortune to inherit soon, so they all behave friendly. The party really gets started when the aunts open a present coming from a banished nephew that turns them into mad carnivorous monsters! No matter where the invitees hide throughout the house, the hungry grannies will find them. The first 30 minutes are rather tame in the gore-department, but still amusing because of the hilariously inept acting and crazy character drawings. We have pretentious lesbians, a cowardly priest and a businessman dealing in weapons. Once the grannies are loose, the film turns into a non-stop splatter party with no limits or boundaries. We're treated to cheesy decapitations, pieces of brains flying around, disembowelment, hacked up torsos and ripped out eyeballs! In order to get rid of that last remaining bit of political correctness, this movie even features the sadistic dismemberment of an 8-year-old girl's legs. Now here's something you don't see every day! "Rabid Grannies" will most likely rank among the favorites of undemanding Troma-groupies, but it's even good enough to recommend it to fans of Peter Jackson's earlier work ("Bad Taste", "Meet the Feebles"). Bon Appetit!

Ah... what a wonderful and wacky world, Troma. Its' own veritable Disney-Land of the perverse, strange, wild, offensive, tasteless, unique, and often brilliant. Where few other films have dared to go. What many filmmakers only dream or fantasize doing... Troma is one of the world's leading, and only still truly, independent sources of films. Their reputation made with the shockingly cheap and shockingly bad; 1976's Blood Sucking Freaks, 1984's The Toxic Avenger, and 1997's Tromeo & Juliet - among others. One could say they sought to bring the same attitude of much of the films considered "video nasties" in the U.K. to America, putting some of the most grotesque and shocking things ever seen onto movie screens. They acquired a cult following, and with the success of Avenger and its' sequels, 1985's Class of Nuke 'Em High, and 1990's Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, began distributing somewhat more respectable films from clearly more ambitious directors. Including 1983's Monster in the Closet (the greatest horror parody I've ever seen), 1990's daring and smart Def by Temptation, and this little Belgian import, Rabid Grannies.

Grannies is a darkly absurd and ingeniously subversive splatter film about two kindly old aunts and their horrible family of shameless, opportunistic ne'er-do-wells involved in all sorts of underhanded doings. When the aunts host a dual Birthday party, the cousins swarm in from all around to put on an act of smirking, fingers-crossed behind-their-back sincerity, each hoping to con the wealthy women into leaving them a chunk of their vast estate and fortune. Meanwhile, the aunts' house staff know all about the double timing and dirty tricks but keep their mouths shut because the women are so close to senility, they probably wouldn't believe them. And so begins the decadent dinner party, where the cousins stab each other in the back and try to raise doubt in another's reputation with the aunts, hoping to make themselves look better by comparison. Until the aunts receive a mysterious surprise gift with a letter from a disinherited cousin who decides not to attend the Birthday party, wishing them all the best. However, when the old ladies open it, they become possessed by evil spirits and mutate into cannibalistic, demonic zombies, hungry for human flesh. And they're not above feasting on their deviously immoral loved ones.

What makes Grannies so brilliant is how well thought-out and smart it is. Yes, the cousins are all despicable, loathsome things. But, when the gore starts to fly, and the death scenes become increasingly mean-spirited and frighteningly intense (the film's one legitimate flaw), you start to see the humanity in them. Even the worst of people have their human side, all evil has an understandable motivation. By that virtue, the sweet old aunt characters are not entirely clean themselves. They are judgmental - especially to the lesbian cousin and her girlfriend, patronizing to their loyal butler Radu (a smarter version of Manuel from Fawlty Towers), and religiously elitist. But they're also kind and charitable (as we see, they help out a homeless beggar in the street), you have to feel bad for them. A little. And finally, when the aunts become possessed, they are suddenly filled with a sense of perception they were missing before. They now see right through all the smiling, lying faces of their nasty relatives, and are not exactly forgiving of all their bad deeds and deception.

Most important to mention is a scene where the demons confront one of their cousins, a priest who hates kids. The first hands him a machine gun and suggests (in a more overt fashion than, but still in the mood of, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) that he kill himself to spare him the agony of being viciously ripped apart. The second tells him not to trust the first because, if the priest kills himself, he will go to hell; suggesting- is an eternity of suffering in the afterlife worth sparing him a few minutes of agony in his current life? They continue bouncing pros and cons off each other, playing a game with him, basically betting over what his choice will be. It's a razor-sharp and clever scene that highlights the film's devilish intelligence and witty subversiveness. Of course, it also goes a little too far as times. Never moreso than when a certain cousin on the plump side has his leg carved open and slowly stabbed, licked, chewed, and devoured by the putrid, alien-like demons. Maybe leaving a little to our imaginations is a good thing.

The film deftly marries elements from 1982's Creepshow, 1987's Dolls, 1985's Demons, and 1981's The Evil Dead, including- the greedy family salivating over an old relative's fortune, being trapped in huge old creepy castle-like mansion, demonic possession from the essence of a somewhat ancient object, and of course, the sadistic murderous zombies with sharp teeth and claw-like fingers. Rabid Grannies would also go on to inspire other rabid grannies in Peter Jackson's 1992 cult classic, Dead Alive (aka- Braindead), and Luca (Ghoulies) Bercovici's grimy little 1995 cheapie, The Granny, whose gore was not nearly as savaged as Rabid Grannies'. Grannies has had an unfortunate DVD history in the eyes of gorehounds. Troma has never cut the film back to its' original uncensored European version. So the film's plentiful, impressive gore effects can only be seen in a montage on Troma's DVD in the special features section- which is also missing at least one key gore sequence.

I can honestly say that I think "Rabid Grannies" is possibly, singularly, the worst film I have ever had the chance to watch. The acting is the equivalent of a 6 year old at the very best. Its hard to see any rational reason this film ever got funding let alone anyone decided to actual make it. The story line has been replicated, to much better standards, at least a thousand times before the directors of this film were even born. The only comedy side to this film is that when the killing starts the people act as though its nothing out of the ordinary. It appears these actors regularly have zombies running around their living room. Please please please avoid this film at all costs and if you can't, try to go to sleep! I am disgusted that this film managed to get 90 Min's of my life!

When I read the title and saw the cover of the video box for this horror film I did not expect a sophisticated shocker. After taking the movie home I was however pleasantly surprised by it's humor and cheesy camp-factor. Those elements, along with the schlocky gore made the film entertaining. A family reunion hosted by two elderly, maiden sisters turns into a blood-fest. The hostesses are possessed by demons unleashed on them by an evil, vindictive and absent relative who sent them the evil spirits in the guise of a birthday gift. Upon opening their unassuming present at the dinner table in the company of their guests (family, friends and associates), the spinsters are transformed into flesh-eating fiends. Here's where the movie takes off and takes off it does! After the first victim is killed while seated at the table the rest of the guests flee for their lives in a spontaneous and morbid game of hide-and-seek. They scatter in all directions hiding from the blood-thirsty matrons while searching for escape from the locked-down manor they're trapped in. Here is where the film provides suspense as we feel the victims' claustrophobic tension. The deaths, which are grisly and at times humorous are still effective. While the plot is predictable the film does hold some surprises. For example the movie contains some typical characters found in horror films but the twist is the fact that some of these "typical" characters who are usually spared in most horror films (simply for moral reasons) are killed here. If you're a fan of the horror genre you will appreciate this mixture of (unintentional?)humor, gore and scares.