Violent s**t 2 (1991)

In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

A heroin deal (which seems to be occurring about thirty feet off a main road, with cars driving by and everything) goes bad. Apparently the heroin is already cut despite being sold at pure price. The buyer kills the seller's henchmen and beats on the seller for a while, until the seller reveals he's just been messing around and kills the buyer with ease. (So what did he need with henchmen, exactly?) The seller is interrupted in his gloating by a fat man wearing Wal-Mart camo and a helmet made from what appears to be a tin waste basket. This man is -- Karl the Butcher, Junior! Da-dunnnnnnnn! Karl kills the drug wholesaler.

Go ahead and hit stop, that was already the best part. No? Fine, then.

From this point on, Violent s**t 2 is mostly indistinguishable from the original. It even recycles footage -- the exact same footage both times -- in a couple of fairly lengthy flashback sequences. Karl Jr. runs around, killing people at random, just like his dad. He at least has something like a reason for doing so, unlike his father. He's doing all this killing at the behest of his mother, who occasionally drinks the blood of Karl's victims, "For the vitamins." After one especially intense day of killing, Karl comes home to find his mother decapitated. Her severed head says something about his father coming back. The End.

Violent s**t 2 is a remarkable step up from the original, in sort of the same way that being punched in the gut is a step up from being kicked in the nuts. Whereas Violent s**t felt like it was just pieced together at random from a few gore scenes Andreas Schnaas had shot with his camcorder, the sequel has actual shot composition (well, sort of), editing for effect rather than just laying one shot after the other, sound effects, and maybe even some minimal lighting done a few times! With the non-sequitur Kung Fu opening, there are even a couple of guys good enough at stunt fighting that Andy probably had to pay them to perform! Wow! Violent s**t 2 also manages to have an intentional sense of humor. Most of it comes from the characteriztion of Karl (as played by Schnaas himself) as a big, fat, dumb, hilbilly brute. Schnaas plays the role well, almost as if he had a lifetime of experience at it, and I found myself chuckling at a few of the jokes. Another huge plus on the technical side of things: none of the DAMNED stutter-cam that Andreas employed so often in the first movie.

Schnaas seems to have learned a lot in between movies, enough so that I think he was trying to take the craft of filmmaking fairly seriously, even though he still ended up with a pile of crap. We'll see if the trend holds in Violent s**t 3.

Something I Learned From This Movie: being stabbed in the arm will cause you to puke up blood.