Take the mockumentary-style candid camera of The Office and turn it on the crew of an indie film where everything goes wrong, and you have the movie Le Fear II: Le Sequel by director Jason Croot. No, it’s not a French film (it’s British), and yes, it is a sequel (that can be watched independently of the first film).
Carlos, an aspiring director, is just trying to make a horror film. He’s bamboozled into a too-good-to-be-true deal with a “producer” and suddenly finds that his shooting location is a public street, which is going to make for a lot of unplanned walk-ons! And that’s the least of the director’s problems.
With its quick quirky humor, eccentric characters, and the mounting comedy of errors, Le Fear II feels like a British sitcom. In fact, I think it would work great as a sitcom. There’s so much going on that it’s easy to get lost in the various subplots, rapid comic setups, and numerous characters, much like when Ab Fab occasionally makes a ninety-minute special instead of its usual short half-hour episode. As it is, Le Fear seems to be turning into a series of films; there are two more sequels already listed on imdb. It’s the ongoing trials and tribulations of Carlos the director!
Speaking of Ab Fab, one of my favorite characters in Le Fear II feels straight out of that show. Butch, foul-mouthed, sexually charged makeup artist Queenie totally rules. No man or woman is safe from her id! The actress, Victoria Hopkins, also happens to have been in Doghouse, one of my favorite zombedies.
A second standout for me is actress Eleanor James, who comes onto the set much later on to play the Vampiress. Her vampire dance alone is comedy gold. I just wish she had come into play earlier on. Hell, I wish she and Queenie would get their own show.
The rest of the cast and crew must contend with each other (there are a lot of personality clashes), an oddball Nigerian witch doctor (there’s a whole Nigerian element here that was lost on this American fool), a producer who talks to dead people, a possessed horror star, the man who owns the land on which they are shooting, and some of the worst “special effects” ever. The scenes of the actors trying to work with a blow-up doll alien are some of my faves.
Being a horror hound, I actually wish there had been more sequences involving the mishaps of making the horror movie itself, because Le Fear II: Le Sequel focuses more heavily on the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. But it’s the satirical segments about the disastrous horror film Carlos is making that deliver the kind of camp we saw in Tim Burton’s take on the film-making attempts of no-budget horror/sci-fi master Ed Wood. Maybe in Le Fear III, Carlos will finally get an opportunity to sink his directing chops into some seriously bad horror film footage.
