aka La Lengua Asesina

• Written and directed by Alberto Sciamma
• Starring
  • Melinda Clarke
  • Michael Cule
  • Robert Englund

In a wonderful setup, Johnny and Candy (the beautiful Mindy Clark) have just gotten away with a bank robbery. They ditch the two security guards who collaborated (Krazy Gluing their lips together in the desert), but Johnny is immediately captured and sent to jail. Mindy lies low in a convent (actually in a gas station run by a handful of nuns) with her four poodles.

Four years later, Mindy gets a letter that Johnny is being released on parole. She kicks up her heels, leaves the nunnery, and prepares to meet Johnny at an abandoned cantina/whorehouse called Porky’s. Unfortunately, the security guards see a picture of Sister Candy in a local color travel magazine.

Oh yeah, Johnny’s also having trouble with the sadistic commander of his work crew, Chief Screw (played with gusto and relish by Robert Englund), who wants desperately to screw up Johhny’s parole and keep him under his thumb.

Into the middle of this already-colorful setup, a red meteorite falls. The mass of it lands in the middle of the desert, but a small spark flies over the hills and into Porky’s, directly into the soup Candy’s making for her and her poodles. Upon consumption, it turns Candy into a black-haired vamp with a black latex catsuit (with a visible spine and a tiny wiggling tail) and an extendable tongue with a mind of its own and a ravenous appetite for human flesh. Later, the tongue grows three little digits with a mouth in between so it can spout its own attitude.

The meteor soup also turns the poodles into four drag queens.

Did I forget the mute nun? She wanders into the desert to follow her visions of the meteor, and becomes almost its patron saint and guardian.

All I can surmise is that writer-director Alberto Sciamma is Peter Jackson’s Spanish cousin. While Killer Tongue doesn’t even try to approach the level of gore in Jackson’s Bad Taste and Dead Alive, there’s the same priority given to humorous shock value, tastelessness, and a plot warped to allow scenes that, you feel, the director always wanted to do.

Yowza.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 15
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 8
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• barfing nuns: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0