ElijahCSkuggs Finally after watching Marauding Mothers, Diabolical Daddies, Wicked Sisters, Jonesin' Uncles and Perverted Twins, I arrived at Rabid Grannies. It didn't totally live up to the hype as being 10 times the movie Diabolical Daddies is but it was still pretty good.Ya got the two grannies, who are actually aunties, who are filthy rich and throwing a birthday party for themselves, with the rest of their immediate family celebrating it with them. Well all seems to be going just divine until a weird lady with a gift shows up. The gift is actually from.....I forget the guy's relation....maybe cousin. Whatever. Well, this present holds a hideous surprise that turns this lil box-social into a full on bloodbath. Woohoo! Rabid Grannies is a wacky friggin flick. It's got a really silly (too much sometimes) attitude and loads of fantastic make-up and gore effects that combine together to make a seriously memorable flick which should be mentioned more in hor/com discussion.Most surprisingly about the flick, is it's creativity. There are some creepy scenes mixed with a sly almost cartoony humor that gels in a pretty unique way. There's one scene with the aunts (grannies) and a priest that is really just out there. One aunt is giving him the opportunity to off himself, while the other is telling him to fight for his life. It's really just a cool friggin scene that really had me smiling.Even though the dialog is sometimes overly hammy, and the dubbing kinda crappy, it kinda makes the movie's ridiculous charm that much more noticeable. Which could be a good thing or bad thing, but for this guy's taste for crazy sh!t, it's a great thing. Would go nice as a double feature with Demon Knight.

Was it All a Dream? Ah... what a wonderful and wacky world, Troma. Its' own veritable Disney-Land of the perverse, strange, wild, offensive, tasteless, unique, and often brilliant. Where few other films have dared to go. What many filmmakers only dream or fantasize doing... Troma is one of the world's leading, and only still truly, independent sources of films. Their reputation made with the shockingly cheap and shockingly bad; 1976's Blood Sucking Freaks, 1984's The Toxic Avenger, and 1997's Tromeo & Juliet - among others. One could say they sought to bring the same attitude of much of the films considered "video nasties" in the U.K. to America, putting some of the most grotesque and shocking things ever seen onto movie screens. They acquired a cult following, and with the success of Avenger and its' sequels, 1985's Class of Nuke 'Em High, and 1990's Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, began distributing somewhat more respectable films from clearly more ambitious directors. Including 1983's Monster in the Closet (the greatest horror parody I've ever seen), 1990's daring and smart Def by Temptation, and this little Belgian import, Rabid Grannies.Grannies is a darkly absurd and ingeniously subversive splatter film about two kindly old aunts and their horrible family of shameless, opportunistic ne'er-do-wells involved in all sorts of underhanded doings. When the aunts host a dual Birthday party, the cousins swarm in from all around to put on an act of smirking, fingers-crossed behind-their-back sincerity, each hoping to con the wealthy women into leaving them a chunk of their vast estate and fortune. Meanwhile, the aunts' house staff know all about the double timing and dirty tricks but keep their mouths shut because the women are so close to senility, they probably wouldn't believe them. And so begins the decadent dinner party, where the cousins stab each other in the back and try to raise doubt in another's reputation with the aunts, hoping to make themselves look better by comparison. Until the aunts receive a mysterious surprise gift with a letter from a disinherited cousin who decides not to attend the Birthday party, wishing them all the best. However, when the old ladies open it, they become possessed by evil spirits and mutate into cannibalistic, demonic zombies, hungry for human flesh. And they're not above feasting on their deviously immoral loved ones.What makes Grannies so brilliant is how well thought-out and smart it is. Yes, the cousins are all despicable, loathsome things. But, when the gore starts to fly, and the death scenes become increasingly mean-spirited and frighteningly intense (the film's one legitimate flaw), you start to see the humanity in them. Even the worst of people have their human side, all evil has an understandable motivation. By that virtue, the sweet old aunt characters are not entirely clean themselves. They are judgmental - especially to the lesbian cousin and her girlfriend, patronizing to their loyal butler Radu (a smarter version of Manuel from Fawlty Towers), and religiously elitist. But they're also kind and charitable (as we see, they help out a homeless beggar in the street), you have to feel bad for them. A little. And finally, when the aunts become possessed, they are suddenly filled with a sense of perception they were missing before. They now see right through all the smiling, lying faces of their nasty relatives, and are not exactly forgiving of all their bad deeds and deception.Most important to mention is a scene where the demons confront one of their cousins, a priest who hates kids. The first hands him a machine gun and suggests (in a more overt fashion than, but still in the mood of, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) that he kill himself to spare him the agony of being viciously ripped apart. The second tells him not to trust the first because, if the priest kills himself, he will go to hell; suggesting- is an eternity of suffering in the afterlife worth sparing him a few minutes of agony in his current life? They continue bouncing pros and cons off each other, playing a game with him, basically betting over what his choice will be. It's a razor-sharp and clever scene that highlights the film's devilish intelligence and witty subversiveness. Of course, it also goes a little too far as times. Never moreso than when a certain cousin on the plump side has his leg carved open and slowly stabbed, licked, chewed, and devoured by the putrid, alien-like demons. Maybe leaving a little to our imaginations is a good thing.The film deftly marries elements from 1982's Creepshow, 1987's Dolls, 1985's Demons, and 1981's The Evil Dead, including- the greedy family salivating over an old relative's fortune, being trapped in huge old creepy castle-like mansion, demonic possession from the essence of a somewhat ancient object, and of course, the sadistic murderous zombies with sharp teeth and claw-like fingers. Rabid Grannies would also go on to inspire other rabid grannies in Peter Jackson's 1992 cult classic, Dead Alive (aka- Braindead), and Luca (Ghoulies) Bercovici's grimy little 1995 cheapie, The Granny, whose gore was not nearly as savaged as Rabid Grannies'. Grannies has had an unfortunate DVD history in the eyes of gorehounds. Troma has never cut the film back to its' original uncensored European version. So the film's plentiful, impressive gore effects can only be seen in a montage on Troma's DVD in the special features section- which is also missing at least one key gore sequence.

j13106 When I read the title and saw the cover of the video box for this horror film I did not expect a sophisticated shocker. After taking the movie home I was however pleasantly surprised by it's humor and cheesy camp-factor. Those elements, along with the schlocky gore made the film entertaining. A family reunion hosted by two elderly, maiden sisters turns into a blood-fest. The hostesses are possessed by demons unleashed on them by an evil, vindictive and absent relative who sent them the evil spirits in the guise of a birthday gift. Upon opening their unassuming present at the dinner table in the company of their guests (family, friends and associates), the spinsters are transformed into flesh-eating fiends. Here's where the movie takes off and takes off it does! After the first victim is killed while seated at the table the rest of the guests flee for their lives in a spontaneous and morbid game of hide-and-seek. They scatter in all directions hiding from the blood-thirsty matrons while searching for escape from the locked-down manor they're trapped in. Here is where the film provides suspense as we feel the victims' claustrophobic tension. The deaths, which are grisly and at times humorous are still effective. While the plot is predictable the film does hold some surprises. For example the movie contains some typical characters found in horror films but the twist is the fact that some of these "typical" characters who are usually spared in most horror films (simply for moral reasons) are killed here. If you're a fan of the horror genre you will appreciate this mixture of (unintentional?)humor, gore and scares.

alanmora "They Love their grandchildren...well done!" This is the tag-line for the bizarre foreign horror flick "Rabid Grannies". This film is distributed by Troma films and despite the negative reviews it has received, I found it to be a lot of fun! Yes the acting is bad...the effects aren't terrible for a B movie but they aren't great either but that's not the point here. There are several horribly offensive scenes such as the one where the child is murdered or the one where the overweight gentleman literally has his ass eaten out. The murder of the priest is also religiously offensive but if you're a religious person, I doubt you'd be watching a film titled "Rabid Grannies". This film is just plain fun to watch...it has just the right amount of blood, guts, gore, murder, madness, mayhem with a little lesbianism and demonology thrown in for good measure!