Fantasia Film Festival 2020 Screening – Screening at the 2020 Fantasia Film Festival, Yummy (2019) gives viewers a taste of Belgium blood by producing a highly entertaining zom-com ready to be devoured by gorehounds and horror-comedy enthusiasts alike. Director Lars Damoiseaux wastes no time letting you know exactly what kind of a time you are in for — blood, roadkill, boobs, butts, and gore are served within the first five minutes, with more wayward body parts, entrails, and creatures joining the characters’ blood-soaked journey of escape along the way.

This movie is absolutely disgusting! Yummy has some truly gut-churning gore that was nauseating, but also, awesome to look at. Yummy‘s special blend of camp, comedy, group dynamics, and gore made for a magnetizing experience, in fact, I eventually felt as though I was in the movie trying to escape as well. The immersive feeling was due to a number of factors, mainly that Yummy goes the extra mile with practical effects — from the dead animals, to the loose limbs, to the blood spattering on the camera lens to make it look almost POV for the audience, Damoiseaux made some very smart artistic choices that created an adventurous but dread-filled atmosphere and pacing that hardly ever let up from start to finish.

Hoping to take her troublesome, hentai-like breasts from an F to a B cup, Alison (Maaike Neuville), along with her plastic surgery fiend mother and her doting boyfriend Michael (Bart Hollanders), head to a cheap hospital for Alison’s breast reduction surgery. While Alison is in surgery, Michael discovers a woman grotesque and seemingly mutilated, and fearing for his girlfriend’s life, he attempts to stop Alison’s surgery but soon finds that the hospital is not only shady, but has been conducting scientific experiments that bite back when unleashed. With a small group of survivors, Alison and Michael try to escape from the hospital, but they find themselves trapped inside with the head doctor’s experiments, mainly reanimated humans.

I would say that Yummy has the familiar bitterly black humor of eastern European films that always seem to ground those movies in reality. This movie’s country of origin is from Belgium yet for the most part Yummy is in English, though some parts have characters whispering in Dutch so that the audience is kept out of the loop of impending dangers. Yummy does become a little slapstick at times, with over the top action rising to meet the over the top amounts of blood, but it is saved by likable characters and a passionate dedication to the zombie design. Though there are of course some boobies to pander to horror hounds, somehow it seems less sensational and more well-placed in the film’s brilliant setting of a plastic surgery clinic. I was hoping to see the creature make more of an impact in the film — besides its initially terrifying introduction, the creature’s other scenes make it seem more like an annoying ant to be crushed. Like the film’s scientific experiment creature subplot, connections between vanity and zombiism were only glossed over, so the social commentary and creature-feature aspects were both unfortunately lost in the mayhem.

It’s like the visual style of Shaun of the Dead but with more of an Evil Dead 2 humor mixed with familiar plot-points from Rec 3 (2012), with the kitchen scenes, police response, and romantic subplot. Yummy relies heavily on its visuals created with practical effects and makeup — Damoiseaux simply throws zombie after zombie and kill after kill at the audience with hardly any pause for true character development, but I suppose who needs character development when you are too busy clapping at all of the splitting heads, right? It is a very modern feeling zombie movie, with relatively fast-moving zombies and their scientific origin premise. Yummy ended just how I like a movie to end — realistically! Bodies on the floor, hard lessons learned, and a cheeky comedic reminder of some joke from earlier in the movie. Nothing is ever perfect, but Yummy comes dangerously close to being quite good.

MOVIE RATING – 6.5/7 out of 10