Anyway, back in 2002, yours truly more or less foamed at the fetlocks over a little independent goof named Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker. To do a little of the David Manning for you all, a particularly plump pull-quote looked a little something like this:

Minute for minute, Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker is as ferocious in its humor as South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, as jam packed with pop culture references as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and as deliciously gross as a Farrelly Brothers' farce. It's not just that the movie is crammed with gag-a-second Airplane-style dialogue and set pieces; it manages an extreme rarity in parent's basement motion picture production: it creates a series of wonderfully wacky three-dimensional characters that we actually get to know and care about.

Oh boy... Now, mind you, me, myself and I stand by every word written, even in a hindsight that is definitely more than 20/20. Mulva was that rarity amongst low budget sputum, a fully realized universe of lunacy where everything, including sexually aggressive apemen and sugar-addicted geeks could live alongside perverted suburbanites and the living dead in hilarious happiness. It represented a real coming of age for writer/director Chris Seaver, a leap out of the basement barricades of his previous productions to truly stand on its own as something special. It was riotous. It was creative. It was insane.

All of which makes the following statement all the more depressing to discuss. The Mulva sequel sucks. Now, it doesn't suck in a really horrendous way. There is still some fun to be found in this dime-store spoof of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films. But this is not the Mulva we've come to know and adore. Nope, this is a newfangled heroine, and honestly, the retrofitting just doesn't work.

The DVD:
After ridding Tromaville of its zombie problem, Mulva is labeled a hero and showered with all manner of praise. This really pisses off Teenape, who believes he is equally responsible for vanquishing the throngs of hungry flesheaters. He gets his gang together – the oddly named Rag Tag Axle Rose Swagger Dance Death Squad – and they invite Mulva over for a little Halloween bash, complete with lots and lots of sweet, sweet candy. Unable to resists, our heroine walks directly into an ambush, where she is beaten to within an inch of her life, and given a hot dose of sugar syrup by the mad monkey. Five years later, Mulva wakes from a saccharine coma, a completely changed woman. Instead of a geek, she's a super-hot action babe who no longer has a lisp – and who now carries a sizable rack of chest flesh. Realizing that revenge is the only way she can satisfy the constant craving in her belly – she's given up the sweet treats as well – Mulva battles various members of the Rag Tag Axle Rose Swagger Dance Death Squad brigade, as well as meeting up with old neighborhood sensei Bonejack to learn the finer points of samurai swordplay. As she cuts and carves her way through the criminal underworld, she has only one thought in her mind. She will payback that primate for what he did to her. No matter what happens in the end, she will not rest until she kills Teen Ape!

If you haven't already guessed by now, and if the DVD cover wasn't blaring hints at you like a badly tuned flugelhorn in a marching band, Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape is a tame lampooning of a certain Miramax man's magnum opus to everything chopsocky and Shaw Brothers. For some reason, Chris Seaver has decided to dump the raging originality he showed in such films as Filthy McNasty and the original Mulva to lurch around the lampoon pool for a while. Previously showing some pitiful skills with the critically panned Quest for the Egg Salad (his shoddy 2002 spoof of the Lord of the Rings), the idea of taking on Kill Bill seems rather silly, once you consider that Tarantino's tale was more or less a big fat send-up of all the martial arts madness in modern movies. Still, it is possible to see something quite sublime coming out of a combination of Quentin's quirks and Seaver's scatology. If done correctly, this combination of craziness could function like a lewd Mad Magazine come to life.

Unfortunately, Seaver is all dumb thumbs in his approach to the fine art of satire. Instead of taking Tarantino to task for all his excesses, he wallows in his own onerous excesses to the detriment of everything he hopes to achieve. On occasion, like the opening battle between Mulva and Squeaky Fromage, he does a decent job of jabbing at The Bride vs. Vernita Green throw down, complete with clever angles and over the top trash talking dialogue. But when trying to capture the enigmatic nature of Kill Bill, with all its monochrome melancholy and stylized sizzle, Seaver stumbles when he should soar, failing to find the proper tone between fresh and foolish to make his mania come alive. As a result, Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape is a caricature in name only, a movie that constantly looks like and acts like its mainstream better, but never finds a way to work itself into a similar filmic frenzy.

Removed from its remake roots, however, we still get a couple of very clever sequences to satisfy our salivating stupidity tooth. When Mulva takes on the Queen of the Lesbian Porn Industry – a bucktoothed treat named Puggly-Ishi, played by Seaver's wife Lauren – the combination of sight gaggery and kinetic camera work make for one funny flare-up. Though it can't compete with the Bride's braggadocios butt kicking of the Crazy 88s, this comic cock-up hints at what a true take-off on Kill Bill really could have become. From the moment we meet that waddling weirdo Puggly, to the final fight in someone's koi pond appointed backyard, Seaver gets it mostly right, and uses his limited production values to enhance, not hinder, the over the top tone.

But where Kill Teen Ape really repeats on you like a bad baloney sandwich is in the reimagining of two of the series most memorable characters. For a long time, this critic has championed the work of Debbie Rochon, B-movie maven extraordinaire and capable crap movie actress par excellence. Indeed, with Miss R in the cast list, you can almost guarantee a potent and professional performance. But here's the rub, and it's rather severe: Debbie taint no Mulva. She is barely even a character, let alone our whirling dervish of desert loving delights. Gone is EVERYTHING that made the original Mulva so memorable – the goofy line readings, the strange, strangled lisp, the ever-present chocolate moustache – and in their place has been put a kind of underdone Uma. Sure, Rochon makes us believe that she is one pissed off piece of poon, ready to rip old Teenape a new monkey gape, but we never once buy into the notion that this is Mulva. And oddly enough, neither does Seaver. He makes no bones about 86-ing our favorite sugar junkie in favor of a ferocious female freedom fighter, yet he still thinks that by simply calling her Mulva, we'll cotton to the con.

Sadly, it just won't wash. Debbie is dynamic and very funny as our artificial Bride, but she's not the crazy creation we all fell in love with a scant few years ago. Why Missy Donatuti did not return to reprise her role is open for speculation (especially after hearing the arcane explanations given in the Making-of featurette and Seaver's own stilted commentary track) but make no mistake about it. Whatever the rationale, her peculiar presence is truly missed...and no amount of gore can make up for it. Indeed, Mulva 2 seems to have less of the red stuff than in the original zombie-thon. Here, it's all decapitations and sword stabbings, torrents of vein juice pouring out of wounds in exaggerated obtuseness. There are a couple of clever claret bits (the eyeball pluck is perfect, as is a mean machete to Teenape's crotch) but it still can't bring back the one thing that would save this sagging story: our one and ONLY Mulva.

But even when he's got the same star in the situation, Seaver still can't help but muck up the merriment. As played by the director himself in the original film (as well as several others), Seaver was sensational as the minstrel show sacrilege known as Mr. Bonejack. Wearing blackface – or actually, more like Jell-o pudding brown face – and matching his Don King wig with an equally exaggerated ethic accent, Seaver turned Bonejack into a super sly commentary on the horrible treatment of minorities at the hands of Hollywood filmmaking. But in Mulva 2, Bonejack has gone ginzu on us, and the resulting lack of color feels like a cop out. Where once Mr. B blathered on about sex and chocolate puddin', now we get a lot of pointless mumbo jumbo that does nothing but waste time. If PC pressures made Seaver ditch his previous interpretation, that's all well and good. But Bonejack's not some stupid old man in an electroshock hairdo – he was an icon of Seaver's Low Budget Pictures and its productions. Now he's just a pitstop on a road going straight to nowhere.

True, Teen Ape is still Teen Ape, doing his dick joke thang to the mutual amusement of all (or maybe just some involved) and the entire cowboy werewolf hunter does have a nice, obscure pop culture reference pay off (a Timmy Cappello quip is always welcome). But for some reason, Mulva 2 just isn't as much fun as the original. On its own, it's half-baked and slightly underdone. It frequently feels like the rush job Seaver states it is in the bonus material - it had a whole THREE days of principle photography - and even at 60 minutes, it's a couple of scenes too long. Seaver is far too scattered with his Kill Bill burlesque, missing obvious moments from the movies while dwelling in other areas that don't really lend themselves to laughs. And the whole thing really makes you wonder about your abject love for the first film.

Of course, there is an easy way to confirm the fun to be had there: just load up the original DVD and dive right in. And then it all becomes painfully obvious again. This is not our Mulva and this is not her typical LBP universe. Gone are the strange self-referential realities, the crazy conflagration of inside jokes and obvious slapstick stupidity. In its place are plenty of dumb developments and even more mindless mishigosh. And buried somewhere deep inside this insipid spoof is the original kernel of cleverness that made the Zombie Ass Kicker such a stellar ride in the first place. And while it may not be fair to constantly correlate between the two, Mulva's rather rote redux just begs for it. This is one disappointing sequel.

The Video:
The on-the-cheap circumstances of Mulva 2's production and schedule come through loud and clear on the painfully poor 1.33:1 full screen transfer offered up by Tempe. Where Mulva 1 seemed perfectly at home in its handmade mannerisms and camcorder creativity, this sequel strains to even offer up an image as good as the worst parts of that first offering. Scenes flare, reds bleed and blend in with other elements, certain scenes are far too dark, while others threaten to white out as the sunlight streams into the lens. This makes for one messy Mulva, and one of the more disappointing visual presentations to come out of Tempe's usually technologically sound line of products.

The Sound:
Aurally, Mulva 2 is also kind of a letdown. Seaver has two distinct modes of aural appreciation – flat, dynamic free dialogue, or over amplified ska party soundtrack time. Both of these sonic facets battle with the other to form a kind of cacophony of coarseness that adds to the overall amateurish feel of the production. This is direct to the internal mic recording, and you can really tell. During the scenes without exploits, we can usually hear the words loud and clear. But when Seaver tosses in action, the ruckus arrives and tends to wipe out everything.

The Extras:
By far the best part of this DVD presentation is the nice selection of bonus features. Aside from an informative, if rather scattered, Behind the Scenes featurette, and a couple of crazy commentaries, there is a Troma-based PSA by none other than Lloyd Kaufman, and a slightly surreal Jen-Co Syrup Commercial. Lloyd does his best, improvising some shtick about how LBP got him in the business, and the ad has some of the wonderfully wacky feel we've come to expect from Seaver and his scenarios. Even better though is the Making-Of, which gives us the director, sans silliness, as he discusses why Mulva 2 was made in the first place. He really didn't want to revisit the fledgling franchise, but claims that the fans – and a phone call from Tempe titan J. R. Bookwalter offering some quick cash – changed his mind. He breezes over the reasons why the original Mulva opted out, but quickly comes to the defense of Rochon. In between his relatively coherent ramblings are scenes of him shooting the film, walking and holding the digital camera to capture his shots. It's an interesting look at how Seaver works, and helps explain a lot of the reasons why this Mulva sequel is so stifled and sloppy.

The commentaries are equally enlightening. Rochon and the LBP gang are on board for a joke filled hour of foolish power as the first alternative narrative track turns into a real par-tee platter. While we do get the occasional salient story, and a few funny jokes as well, this is more or less a free for all with everyone speaking at once and drowning each other out with their desire to be heard. Better is Seaver's solo shot, though he claims to be so tired throughout that you can hear the tendency toward sleep in his haggard, weary voice. But at least he describes the problems with locations, the Hellacious three day shooting schedule and why he opted for the Kill Bill idea over a more Monster Squad style story for the sequel. At times he is too self-deprecating and derogatory, and he is not afraid to point out where he thinks his films have gone wrong. In many ways, the story behind the scenes is far more interesting that what is on the screen, and that's what makes this aspect of the DVD so interesting. The movie may be mediocre, but the elements surrounding its making are imminently fascinating.

Final Thoughts:
Perhaps this is the best way to judge this disappointing disc: if you are a rolled in oats, staunch as a starched collar fan of the original Mulva and all her candy hording hilarity, then steer clear of this unsatisfactory fricative of a film, pronto. And if you loved Kill Bill, and think a spot-on parody of Quentin's quagmire is just what the joke doctor ordered, then up your prescription of Thorazine and forget this movie was ever made. Somewhere in the middle lies an indefinable group of LBP fans, b-movie film buffs and individuals desperate for any mode of entertainment, no matter how badly bungled. For them, Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape is a right regular retreat from the trash touted by Tinsel Town. But mark the words of a man who is tired of dining on his own demented praise for the first film. There is something about this sequel that's not quite right, and it doesn't stem from the casting or the kung fu recreation of a certain cinema geek's delight. No, Mulva 2: Kill Teen Ape feels unnecessary, doing nothing to advance the legacy of either the initial movie or its maker. Nothing is more disappointing than a lame sequel to a film you adore. But this barely a rental reject threatens to erase the memory of our original Mulva, and that's a crime.

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