2 Lava 2 Lantula! (2016) Review

2 Lava 2 Lantula! (2016) Review

 

Five years ago I reviewed Lavalantula, which was a surprisingly fun and entertaining SyFy original movie—something I almost never say, because nearly all of SyFy’s made-for-TV movies are garbage. This year, I finally got around to watching the sequel, and going into it, I was a little skeptical, but mostly hopeful. On the down side it had a different director and none of the supporting cast returned, but on the up side the same writers wrote the script, and the description on the back teased a final showdown with the mother of all lavalantulas, appropriately called—and I can’t stress the awesomeness of this name enough—Gargantulantula. Why I had any form of expectations going into a movie called 2 Lava 2 Lantula is beyond me, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed.

The plot is…basically the same as the first one. Fissures open in the ground, lavalantulas crawl out, Colton West A.K.A. Action Hero Man returns to save the day, played again by Steve Guttenberg, and it culminates in a final battle with the Gargantulantula. While similar, it isn’t an exact imitation of the first movie. This time, Colton West is a big name actor again, and he’s on-set at the beginning of the movie with a super annoying director at the helm. Seriously, the director character is so over-the-top and fussy I just wanted him either killed by a lavalantula or to stop showing up, neither of which happens. Colton teams up with his best friend and his assistant, and both characters are, thankfully, entertaining and not annoying (though the best friend is a lot funnier than the assistant).

There’s a secondary storyline similar to the first movie, this time with Colton’s step-daughter trying to escape the attack in Miami, and it’s a bit of a step-up from the first movie’s secondary storyline. The supporting characters are more fun, and it’s spiced up even more with lavalantulas that now shoot spikes in addition to fire. The creatures show up regularly enough, and there’s one pretty cool moment when a character erupts with baby spiders out of her eyes. It could’ve done with more scenes like that, though, because for the most part the spiders don’t do anything too interesting. The visual effects are much less consistent this time, with some shots looking on-par with the acceptable quality of the first movie, and other shots looking like the typical texture-less-and-shadow-less-renderings common in SyFy films.

In the first movie, there are a lot of references to other movies. This time, they took it way, way too far. Everything from Jurassic Park to Star Wars to Crocodile Dundee to Dr. Strangelove. Nothing is sacred to these writers. They left no stone unturned, and they leaned even harder into the jokes and humour. Only problem: very few of the jokes are actually funny, most have obvious set-ups, and some of them are repeats from the first movie. They even have a character say the title! “It’s two lava, two lantula.” The funny part about that? It actually surprised me the writers thought to do it. 

So, do I recommend 2 Lava 2 Lantula? Actually…yeah, I do. If you were a fan of the first one like I was, then you need to see the sequel at least once. The fact that there are not just one but two movies about giant lava-spewing tarantulas that are even watchable and not total piles of crap is quite a miracle, and this second one has just enough good stuff to be worth a shot, even if you’ll probably forget about it as soon as it ends.