Crazy Fat Ethel 2

I really don't know where to begin with this one.

On one hand, it sort of comes off as a Troma movie, you know, a movie that's intentionally kind of bad but for the sake of the joke? But I did my research. It isn't. It was a fully intentional movie, which only leads to even worse questions. I guess I should start off with the very obvious disclaimer that the first thing wrong with this, or first two things really, are the words in the title. Crazy and Fat. Now, I know a lot of people bemoan the use of the word crazy in place of "evil" and I understand why, as I myself have a pretty long list of mental health problems. But to me the even worse one is the fat. In no way do I condone the usage of someones weight as a prop for their villainy or as an example of terror and disgust. That's just downright hurtful, and I am not gonna sit here with that. So with that out of the way, let's really dive into this thing.

First off, it's just a poorly constructed box, from top to bottom, start to finish. The weird blue overlay at the top of the front, with a mean rhyme from 4th grade that they didn't even at least attempt to make into some sort of pun or something, is so strange and out of place. Not only could they not create their own tagline, they used a tagline an elementary school child would use and then didn't even attempt to change it even just slightly to make it their own thing. Talk about lack of creativity. And what makes it worse is that they doubled down on it, and used it on the BACK as well. The font at the bottom is absolutely atrocious and looks like something you'd seen on someone's Xanga blog back in 2007. It does not mesh with the rest of the box, and the coloring is terrible. Not to mention that big ugly 2 they've slapped behind it, which only clashes everything further. From a graphic design standpoint, this thing is actually scarier than the movie it's promoting.

Now, apparently, according to the wikipedia, someone did have some sense of decency and the film has been renamed "Criminally Insane", which, while still a bad title because of it's implications towards mental health insinuating it leads to physical violence, they've at least not focused the title on the fatness aspect, and that's...appreciated, I guess? I don't know, man, I'm not overweight, so it's hard for me to speak on this sort of thing, but I'm still trying to go to bat for all you people out there who are and are being poorly represented by awful things. But what's even worse is how there were three of these films. Yeah. Three. The latest one came out in 2016 and had been re-retitled back to "Crazy Fat Ethel", so who really knows who cares about anyone at this point.

And if you think this movie just hates fat people, oh boy, check out this wiki except from the first film that I screenshot by someone who, clearly, understands how wrong this film is just by their wording of it. The woman mentioned in this screenshot is Ethel's sister.

Like, listen, this movie is from 1975 and okay, it's of its time, and all that baloney, but holy cow. This is just downright sickening, the treatment of women all around in this flick. Not only that, but I have one very specific bone to pick with this movie as a former film student, and that is that it's only 61 minutes, which BARELY qualifies it as a feature film. I guess there's only so much fat shaming and misogyny one can cram into a bad movie before it runs out of steam, huh. But boy howdy, if you thought that wasn't bad enough, check THIS one out!

There is absolutely nothing about this collection of words that says "coherent storytelling" or even "story worth telling". Listen, I like dark shit as much as the next lady, but who the fuck wrote this movie, and by wrote I mean scribbled with crayons in the back of their preschool binder, because that's how immaturely stupid and incomprehensible the whole thing is.The back of the box looks like something someone would make in a photoshop knockoff, just that terrible title font again in between two really poor screenshots, and any movie that tries to "warn" you of how gross or whatever it's going to be is not going to be good. That's just a solid fact, okay. It's been done to death, it's entirely to entice your curiosity, stop falling for it. "Mature Audiences Only", gee, I'd hope so! I wouldn't want to rent this thinking, "my kids will love this laugh-o-rama of a light hearted romp!"

And I know the title is awful, but the title they gave it, "Criminally Insane" is even worse is some ways simply because of how goddamned generic it is. That could be ANY slasher B movie, alright? If you're going to rename something, at least give it something sort of interesting and unique, not just "Killer Man 3: The Killening!"

Those excerpts I used were actually from the first movie, because, well, look at the wikipedia bit for the second film.

That's right. I had to pull stuff from the first movies page because the second IS BARELY A MOVIE. In fact, not only does it only contain roughly thirty minutes of new content, it's also STILL only 60 minutes long, AND it came out 12 years after the original! I'm flummoxed. They did it. They always do this to me. They finally confuse me. And it's the same writer/director for both, too, it's not like the sequel was something someone else made, or someone at a studio went "You know what would be an easy cash in, right?" and then produced, in the lightest sense of the word, this film. No. The same guy made this movie. Perhaps he's the one who was crazy all along for thinking any of us wanted either of these.

It's and ugly box with an ugly vibe that equates weight and mental health, and not even in a way that could be theoretically self aware, with evil and murder and cannibalism and the whole thing stinks to high heavens. I'm not usually a morality judge when it comes to these boxes, god knows, they're just VHS art, but I've had a bad week and I'm in a bad mood and I'm having to look at two bad fucking movies and I'm mad, alright? End of story.

The only thing I want Crazy Fat Ethel to eat is a load of shit, because that's what it is.