Review: ‘YUMMY’ bites deep with grisly gore

(Shudder)

Look, we love zombies. Walking corpses tearing into raw flesh, jagged incisors puncturing a vein, blood spurting onto the camera, throaty screams that make you shiver ⏤ such apocalyptic imagery stimulates a deep, animalistic hunger in us all. As a classic horror sub-genre, it largely runs uninspired these days, unless you’re like Netflix’s steroid-charged Black Summer or you’ve managed to completely reenergize yourself like The Walking Dead has done in the last two years. Generally, though, there’s little left to explore or analyze.

Then enters YUMMY, Lars Damoiseaux’s delightfully gut-churning feature debut, a film so grotesque that it may literally make you puke (there’s a vomit moment that had me gagging). Maaike Neuville stars as Alison, a warm, unsuspecting lead, whose life has long been dictated by her botox-obsessed, overbearing mother Sylvia (Annick Christiaens). When Alison toys with getting a breast reduction, going against her mother’s wishes, she travels to an Eastern European clinic, recommended by her boyfriend and former medical student Michael (Bart Hollanders), for the procedure.

Everything about the hospital appears a little off. It’s a structurally surrealist and grimy landscape through which Damoiseaux juxtaposes our culture’s obsession with plastic surgery and the brain-dead polluting the planet. The side characters, from icky rapist/misogynist Daniel (Benjamin Ramon) to the cold, stoic Janja (Clara Cleymans), wear pretty thin. What lacks in emotional punch ⏤ outside of Neuville, who gives such a meaty, badass performance (“But why did you have to insist on always looking like a fucking teenage whore,” she spits at her zombified mother before chopping her head with an axe) ⏤ Damoiseaux makes up with savage gore. Some of the sickest gags ⏤ including, but not limited to, a flaming penis, a still-attached arm shoved through a paper shredder, and intestines as rope ⏤ make you go “awe” and “eww” in the same breath.

YUMMY is a fine addition to zombie-land, and its jaw-dropping ending will either please you or make you scream. The film is certainly not reinventing the wheel ⏤ in fact, many of its plot points or character decisions are frustrating as hell ⏤ but the cinematography (courtesy of DP Daan Nieuwenhuijs) has some slick and eerie charm that’ll just hypnotize you. It’s worth, at the very least, popping on and poppin’ some popcorn.

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