Rabid Grannies

So, this one's a movie I originally saw years ago...thus, I barely remember it. It's a weird, gory comedy called Rabid Grannies, and the title more or less explains itself. So, sit back, enjoy, and get ready for messy SPOILERS!

The opening scene concerns a pale, nervous priest asking a superior for permission to attend a family gathering. The kooky title appears, then we meet the family as they arrive at a country estate for the gathering. Errr, well some of them get as far as a pub, I guess. Oh, and the grannies sniff a lot of cheese. And pray. Perhaps we should all pray that we survive this one...

Then we meet a nervous young servant named Alice/Ally. The immense, overbearing  head cook demands that Ally help her pluck some birds for the dinner. As she grills the helpless younger servant for gossip from town, feathers go flying every which way. Man, it sucks to be a bird in the countryside, huh?

Up next is an obese man and his lean wife. I assume that this is the Bizarro-world's version of Jack Sprat and his spouse. I haven't caught wind of their names yet, so he's now Jack Fatt, and his wife is now Virginia Slim. It's times like these, where I can't decide whether I love this crap or hate it.

Anyway, onto an even more anonymous family at a gas station. The bratty boy and girl in the back seat are fighting over a box of cookies, and their mother is quickly losing control of the situation. After their father finishes pumping the gas, he gets in the driver's seat, grabs the cookie package from his children, and shoves the rest of the cookies in his own mouth. Awesome. Okay kids, fight over a bottle of rat poison next!

There's a brief scene between an unidentified (*sighhhhh*) weapons manufacturer and his assistant Michael, then we see a spinster, dressed all in black, and riding a bike. Just as I'm about to blow my top over her not having a name either, a younger guy speeding down the road recognizes her as a relative named Bertha. Being an ass, he runs her bicycle off of the road.

We see Ally in a maid's outfit, trying to get the guest bedrooms ready for the family reunion. The larger servant just watches her do all of the work. Is it too early to start wanting to see some of these folks dead? Most of the characters we've seen thus far are major ass-hats.

Now we meet a pair of lesbians who work together at the same magazine. They agree to keep their relationship a secret from the Grannies, who are far more conservative than the rest of the clan. Then we're dropped back into the mansion, where a servant named Radu is assuring a matronly-looking woman that everything is ready for the guests.

Most of them arrive at the same time, and poor Radu is forced to lug around their bags from the ground floor to the bedrooms. Jack Fatt is close behind him, with both of his beefy paws shoved into his pockets while he acts pompous in front of Virginia Slim and the other relatives. His death better be a good one!

Radu then leads the rest to their rooms, and everyone unpacks and prepares for dinner. I'd describe the 2 brief scenes that occur between guests before the dinner, but what's the point? Until these generic stereotypical people are mentioned by name, it's all meaningless.

Anyway...the dinner scene. Alice and Radu serve each guest their own lobster, and the alcohol begins to  loosen some of the guests up as well. The old weapons dealer is named Harvey(...1 down...), and he doesn't take it well when he is criticized for what he does for a living. The woman doing the complaining is Heather(2 down! Yay!), and one of the not-yet-rabid title characters takes her side.

Then the twitchy priest, Percival(3 characters named in less than a minute!Let's party!!) is drawn into the debate. Then there's another guest at the front door, so Alice is ordered to see who it is. She afraid of the dark, but no one gives her a choice in the matter. She trudges outside, and begins the endless hike to the front gate, which looks like it involves changing time zones several times. Let's all chip in, and buy Alice a golf cart!

Alice trudges out into the cold, dark air, and finds a woman outside the front gate who looks exactly like Frau Blucher(*horses screaming*). She stares straight ahead like a zombie, and repeatedly demands that Alice needs to open the gate. She then somehow opens the gate herself, and gives Alice a mysterious package, making the young servant promise to give the gift to the elderly birthday girls as soon as possible. Alice quickly heads back to the estate, and tells her "boss" everything that happened.

In the dining room, Jack Fatt's wife reveals that their marriage is pretty much a sham, then one of the grannies distracts everyone with the strange gift that was just delivered. Mousy Bertha gets the old biddies excited for opening birthday presents, and Radu is sent out to gather the rest of the gifts. For some reason, they decide to save the gift that got them all worked up in the first place for last.

Then, they finally open the envelope that came with the package. It contains a letter from someone named Christopher, who apparently is the black sheep of the family. His letter promises that the gift he sent was heartfelt, and that it will be memorable.

Just the mention of his name causes a furious uproar among the party guests. The young playboy, Gilbert(I'm guessing his name, using the cast list from IMDB, and eliminating the names we definitely know thus far...), reveals that Christopher was shunned by the family for being a practicing Satanist. He even served prison time, for allegedly desecrating a graveyard for one of his mysterious rituals.

Anyway, the package is opened. It contains a creepy-looking carved box, but the birthday cake is brought to the table before we can see what the box contained. The candles are blown out, then a song is sung, and no one seems to notice a weird smoke floating out of the creepy box.

Harvey makes a toast, and it appears that the 2 old ladies drink up the mystery smoke, which collected in their glasses. At the same time, the servants are separated. As the dinner guests start up a playful chant, asking Radu to bring them a knife for the cake, no one seems to realize that the old women are slumped back in their chairs, undergoing some kind of transformation. Underneath the table, their hands are becoming razor-sharp claws, and their faces begin to tear apart and become monstrous.

One of the Rabid Grannies stretches an arm out like a tentacle, and impales the large guy's wife. Screaming, the rest of the party leap away from the table to escape, just as Alice comes in with a knife for the cake. One Rabid Granny sends her crashing through a window, where she slams into the hood of a car, and seemingly dies.

Percy tries to get upstairs by crawling, then finally figures out how to run. The last 2 servants are just sitting in the kitchen, calmly sipping at bowls of soup and scarfing down bread. One of the demons howls, and the old lady stops eating long enough to decide that it sounds like a bad case of indigestion.

Heather, Jack Fatt's wife(name!!), and one of the older men lock themselves in an upstairs room, just as Percy bangs on the door. He begs them to let him in, but none of them are certain it's even him out in the hall. It actually is him, and they let him in after a ridiculous amount of time has passed.

In another room, a weepy Bertha listens as Jack Fatt claims that the transformation and the resulting deaths were hallucinations. He leaves the room to prove it, and a scuffle is heard. When he comes back in, scratched up and shaken, he admits that the rabid grannies are authentic.

One of the rabid grannies then stalks What's-Her-Face and Gilbert. She leaps through a painting to scare them, then shows off her Freddy Krueger-looking fingernails. Off they go running! One, two...Grannie's after you...

They get down into a water-filled tunnel, and the rabid granny ambushes them a second time. This leads to an outdoor chase, and the couple trying to get away in a car that won't start. They get the engine to turn, but the evil granny breaks into the car, slaughters Gilbert, then kills his "girlfriend" by running her over right after she exits the vehicle.

The little girl is now named Susie. Her mother has just now realized that she excused herself to use the bathroom before the attack began. Uh, anyone want to volunteer to venture out and find her? Yeah, me neither.

As luck would have it, Susie just now returns, calling out for her Mommy. A disembodied voice lures her further down the corridor. Susie finds a rabid granny in a dusty, dark toyroom, and is gullible enough to sit on the lap of the monster.

Oh, and Susie's mother is Helen.

Helen and the others in the room leave to rescue the little girl, and Percy chickens out. They find Susie with the possessed grannies, and she appears to be the main course of a feast they're having. The rescue is abandoned, and the group returns to their room, where I discover that Gilbert was actually Susie's brother, not the road hog. He is now a demon too, and he bites his mother's fingers off of one hand.

Rachel and the real Gilbert(confused yet? I am!) lock themselves away, and the rest of the now-possessed family taunt and frighten them. Then Percy's faith is tested by John, the father of Susie and Gilbert.
John then runs out to join the larger group,who squabble over what to do next.

They venture out into the kitchen. The large servant is dead, and Radu is curled up in a corner, crying and unable to work up the courage to escape. Then Fatboy gets stuck in a tunnel, and is discovered by the rabid grannies. They eat him right there, and the one who tried to help him out, Harvey, returns to face down the crazed killers.

Harvey grabs a powerful shotgun, and hunts for the rabid grannies. After shooting several rounds at one of the grannies, Harvey uses the weapon to club her several times as well. One down, one to go...maybe?

If only the second monster went down so easily as the first! The other possessed woman marches in, wearing a suit of armor. The ammunition bounces off of the armor, and she attacks Harvey with a sharp blade, chopping pieces of him apart.

Radu tries to escape, and slips on some slippery entrails. The resulting fall cuts his face apart. Then Percy is cornered by the monster grannies. They yell at him until they convince him that suicide will save him from further torment. Uh, doesn't his religious training contradict that?

Bertha finds Percy, and screams at the possessed grannies. Then she convinces Helen and Gilbert to let her join them. I swear, these "Let me in!" scenes are 95% of the entire script. Then Bertha destroys the box that started the whole curse, and that seems to destroy the rabid grannies.

During the investigation and the aftermath of the attack, it's revealed that Bertha became possessed, and she kills a cab driver. THE END.

What a terrible waste of 90 minutes. Nothing more to say. 0 out of 5. Anything I see beyond this has got to be better than this film. See you next time.

What?

Oh, okay fine...and what did I "learn" from viewing Rabid Grannies?

-A good writer mentions who his characters are early in a story, especially when there are a billion to keep track of in that story.

-A massacre can actually be dull.

-"Rabid Grannies" are actually "Possessed Aunties"...get it right, movie!

Okay, I'm out! Later...