‘Yummy’ Review: Dir. Lars Damoiseaux [Fantasia 2020]

With devastating wild fires, mass floods, murder hornets, and a global pandemic, amongst the plethora of things that have made 2020 so tough, we can at least be thankful that the zombies haven’t arrived. Yet. The same cannot be said for loving couple, Alison (Maaike Neuville) and Michael (Bart Hollanders), in Fantasia film Yummy, whose quiet trip to a hospital sees them fighting for their lives against a horde of the undead.

Alison is a young woman, who like many, is unhappy with her body. Her breasts are the main cause of her distress with her appearance as they’re so large and painful; day-to-day life is hard. There’s also all the unwanted attention from men who can’t help but look and comment on their size. Believing a breast reduction will help make her life easier, Alison and her doting boyfriend Michael decide to join her mother at a clinic specialising in plastic surgery. At first, the clinic seems fine, a little more bedraggled than they had led to believe, but still comprising some talented staff. What they don’t know is that the head doctor and his staff have been tampering with stem cells, and their work has inadvertently created a virus capable of raising the dead. Cue zombie carnage as the hospital comes under attack.

Yummy might just be the perfect tonic for all the starkly seriousness of the world that we live in at the moment. Right from the start, the tone is heightened and elevated to that of a more traditional horror so there is no mistaking where this film is headed. Director Lars Damoiseaux never lets the film get too serious, but there are still some fleeting moments of levity that help stop Yummy from being utter into silliness. These mainly involve some more serious exchanges between our characters whom handle the situation they find themselves in, quite well.

A lot of facets of the core characters however, remain unexplained. The lack of clarity of information serves as a slight cause of friction between the viewer and what they are watching. Alison for one, seems to go from being madly in love with Michael, to on the verge of breaking up with him from one scene to the next. It’s confusing, as until the outbreak begins, she’s all loved up with her ‘Pookie Bear’. Their relationship then see-saws back and forth for the rest of the film; Alison also seeks comfort in hospital worker Daniel (Benjamin Ramon), whom from previous conversations with Michael, we know is a creep. Other characters, such as Alison’s mum, are almost immediately forgotten about once they leave the screen. In fact, the only character given any real development or arc is that of Daniel, but even then he follows the potential villain path to a tee.

This leads us to the next issue with Yummy, despite the interesting choice of location, it follows all the typical zombie movie tropes. We have an evil doctor, someone that gets bit but the characters keep them around anyway, and someone else who gets bit and hides it from the rest of the group. It’s like a game of zombie film bingo and whilst that makes for a fun viewing with friends, it doesn’t help add anything fresh or exciting to the genre.

If like Michael, you happen to be a hemophobe (afraid of blood) then you’ll likely have a hard time with Yummy. Being a zombie film, Yummy is of course packed with blood and guts galore. It’s grimly gooey in places too, almost reaching Troma heights of ick. The hospital setting allows for a lot of unexpected and inventive take-downs, and there’s some impressive practical make-up FX on display. Although Yummy is a zombie film, the gross-out of the film has little to do with the undead at all. We won’t go into too much detail, but it involves a virgin, a man who is recovering from a penis enlargement, and flammable things. It’s such an elaborately constructed sequence of events that it feels like something out of a Final Destination movie. It’s easily the event that you’ll remember most about Yummy, but with it having no direct link to zombies, it does overshadow the real movie monsters.

Harmless and gloopy fun, Yummy is great for an evening’s entertainment, but fails to add enough originality to get us really excited.

Yummy was reviewed at Fantasia 2020.