Director/Screenplay – Liam Regan, Producers – Lloyd Kaufman & Liam Regan, Photography – Hamish Saks, Music – Joe Renzetti, Visual Effects – Maniac Films (Supervisor – Mark Brindle), Makeup Effects – Graham Taylor, Production Design – Garreth Gibson & Catherine Stepien. Production Company – Refuse Films/Derek’s Don’t Run Films/Karl’s Chalet Productions.
Cast
Lyndsey Craine (Beth Conner), Lala Barlow (Miss Campbell), Vito Trigo (Mr. Sawyer), James Hamer-Morton (Mark Conner), Charlie Bond (Frankie Sullivan), Alexander J. Skinner (Ethan Rembrandt), Justin A. Martell (Tusk Everbone), Annabella Rich (Nancy Applegate), Laurence R. Harvey (Clyde Toulon), Emily Haigh (Clarissa), Michaela Longden (Melissa), Sierra Summers (Sabrina), Dani Thompson (Deetz Montgomery), Paris Rivers (Byron Law), Lloyd Kaufman (Dr Samuel Weil), Sarah Waldron (Waitress)
Plot
Beth Conner is about to turn eighteen. She attends Henenlotter High School where there is prejudice against her because she is a Goth. The school gets a new headmaster in Mr. Sawyer who determines to host an annual All You Can Eat Massacre. After biting off the ear of the school’s date rapist Ethan Rembrandt and then killing him, the vegan Beth discovers a taste for human flesh. She then meets the new teacher Miss Campbell and discovers desire for her. As they realise their mutual attraction, Beth also finds that Miss Campbell shares the same cannibalistic tendencies.
Liam Regan is, as far as I am aware, the first British director to make a Troma film. Elsewhere, Regan has directed one of the segments of the British anthology Self Induced Nightmares (2013) and then the feature-length My Bloody Banjo (2015), which was distributed by Troma. He has also made acting appearances in Troma’s Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 (2013) and Return to Return to Nuke ‘Em High Aka Vol. 2 (2017), as well as produced Full Moon’s Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong (2011), Don’t Go the Reunion (2013) and Troma’s Kevin Walter’s Tower Rats (2020).
Troma films specialise in a great deal of Bad Taste and offensively un-PC humour. If you have ever wondered what a Troma film would look like trying to adjust to the era of #MeToo and Woke politics, then Eating Miss Campbell is the answer. It is a film where all the un-PC humour comes in constant ironic quote marks. We get jokes about sexual harassment, Rohypnol and date rapists, toxic masculinity and Cancel Culture. All at the same time as the film has a proactive heroine that is eliminating systemic abusers and tearing down the patriarchy.
Lyndsey Craine (c) as Beth Conner
We get topless scenes at the same time as the film is telling us how topless scenes represent a pandering to the lowest common denominator vs an A24 film where such is regarded as progressive. It is a truly bizarre sight trying to watch the normally wilfully offensive Troma product contorting to fit the new morality. In one of the most outrageous scenes, we get Laurence R. Harvey, who gained a cult following as a result of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011), stripped naked and his dick bitten off, amid jokes about him praying to Harvey Weinstein.
Not to mention, it is a film where it is being aggressively meta and namechecking the clichés in the dialogue as they pop up. The film opens on Lyndsey Craine addressing the camera and deconstructing the particular genre she is in. A scene comes with lines like “Meta and self-aware foreshadowing is so fucking pretentious.” It is rare I have seen a film with such a mind-spinning rapidity of meta-aware dialogue.
