Movie Review: Porkchop 2 - Rise of the Rind (2012)

Directed by Eamon Hardiman
Starring Sam Qualiana, Angela Pritchett and Rob Cobb
Run Time: 71 minutes

When young Simon Robertson moves with his family to a new town, he thinks the biggest peril will be the local high school bullies. Unfortunately, Simon’s new friend Meg informs him that the town has a much darker secret: a body count stretching into the hundreds- courtesy of Porkchop, a deranged serial killer in a pig mask. And even worse, Simon discovers the house his family has moved into belongs to the angry oinker. When the madman resurfaces, Simon, Meg and the rest of the high school kids are in for one hell of a night, as their party gets crashed and one by one they are taken out, with a post-hole digger, bong, tiki torch, chainsaw and basically anything this guy can get his hands on.

I first watched this one about a month ago and my initial impression was that it stunk. I put off writing the review and sort of forgot about it. Pulling it off the shelf this evening I thought it would be a little unfair to write it off without watching it again, so I did. And I am glad to say that I enjoyed it quite a bit more the second time around, (some movies are just like that I guess). It's not a great movie, in fact its a really bad movie, but it does have some endearing qualities that should make it attractive to fans of the slasher genre.

On the positive side- There are some pretty decent kill-scenes, particularly the opening scene where Porkchop takes out two butter-face lesbians with a post-hole digger while they are busy rug-munching in the woods, and the tiki-torch braining of a hapless blonde was pretty sweet as well. The script wasn't too bad either, as a fair portion of the comedy was actually kind of amusing, albeit quite silly. Overall the movie had a kind of odd, quirky feel to it, due in most part to the work of the two main characters, who are the town outcasts and are basically shit on by the rest of the kids. And I did like the fact that one of our two main characters gets smoked fairly early in the movie, which provided a surprisingly unexpected moment in a movie filled with predictable outcomes.

On the negative side- For the most part, this is just another paint-by-the-numbers slasher flick with a worn-out story-line and not-so-intimidating masked killer. In fact, this is probably the worst, most laughable pig mask I’ve seen so far in a horror movie, (30 years later and still, no one has been able to come up with a pig mask to top Farmer Vincent in Motel Hell). Another thing I found a bit annoying was the fact that not one person even gets a single lick in on the killer, its just one kill after another....like lambs to the slaughter. And the ending was one a seasoned horror fan would see coming from a mile away. It's a bad movie with a few saving graces, so I guess if your one of those people who enjoyed Friday the 13th parts 2 through 12 or Halloween, parts 5 through 60, then you’ll probably dig this one. I score it 5 out of 10.

Extras-
*Feature Commentary
*Behind the Scenes
*Trailers