ADULT SWIM YULE LOG 2: BRANCHIN' OUT (2024)

Studio:   Adult Swim
Director: Casper Kelly
Writer:   Casper Kelly
Producer: Matt Foster, Alan Steadman, Phil Samson
Stars:    Andrea Laing, Michael Shenefelt, Sharon Blackwood, Asher Alexander, Chase Anderson, Jesse Malinowski

Review Score:

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Summary:

Having survived her previous ordeal, a traumatized woman enters an idyllic Hallmark holiday movie scenario, but a sentient yule log returns to stalk her.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Chief Robles and Officer Gibbons of the Raburn Police Department review video footage of the recent Booth Mountain massacre that began in front of a rental cabin’s fireplace. A short time later, the sentient yule log that caused the chaos escapes from an evidence locker and ignites an explosion that blows up the police station.

Having unexpectedly survived the yule log attack that killed her fiancé Alex, Zoe recovers from her ordeal, but remains so traumatized by the experience that she constantly carries an ax with her, including to the Coral Conservatory office where she works. During a video meeting with a wealthy donor, Zoe shocks coworkers when she hallucinates a vision of the yule log attacking her. Zoe’s boss Tatiana fires Zoe.

Zoe’s gay best friend Jakester suggests Zoe needs a Hallmark movie-like getaway to help her heal, so he books a trip to Mexico for the two of them. On their drive, Zoe and Jakester pass an exit for the small town of Mistletoe. Spying them from nearby bushes, Santa uses his magic to disable Jakester’s car.

Due to their car troubles, Zoe and Jakester discover they are stranded in Mistletoe until after Christmas. Jakester stays behind at the auto repair shop to hook up with attractive tow truck driver Tanner while Zoe ventures into the colorful town in search of a helicopter to get them past blocked roads.

Zoe bumps into conceited social media influencer Beauregard, who takes a romantic interest in Zoe. Because his wealth affords him a helicopter, Zoe agrees to have dinner with Beauregard.

Zoe bumps into a series of handsome men including a farmer named Dale, fireman Blaze, and construction worker Cole. Birt Card picks up Zoe from the ground and brings her into the ornament store he runs with his mother Nana and young son Jaxon. Zoe learns Birt has been running the shop since his wife Savannah died, but they are in danger of losing their small business because of a bigger ornament store opening nearby.

During their dinner together, Beauregard agrees to let Zoe leave Mistletoe on his helicopter. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Zoe bumps into a shopper named Shawn. When Shawn begins flirting with Zoe, Beauregard has his bodyguard Roger escort him away. After that encounter, Beauregard brings Zoe to his massive “Morenaments” store, which she realizes is what’s putting Birt out of business.

Meanwhile, the killer yule log stows away in a car belonging to a family headed out for a camping trip. The flying log brutally slaughters the camping family and continues making its way toward Mistletoe.

Zoe returns to the auto garage to collect Jakester, but Jakester tells her he wants to stay in Mistletoe to continue his fling with Tanner. On her way to the heliport, Zoe bumps into airplane mechanic Dash. Arriving too late, Beauregard’s helicopter takes off without Zoe.

Passing by in his car, Birt picks up Zoe and brings her back home to stay with his family. Birt and Zoe have a bonding moment when they discuss how his wife Savannah and her fiancé Alex died. The two of them take their significant others’ cremated remains and store them in a bedroom closet.

The following morning, Zoe tells Birt everything that happened with the killer yule log. Birt hooks up Zoe to a homemade machine that forces her to face her trauma. Zoe comes out of the experience feeling cheery and more optimistic.

Representing Beauregard, unscrupulous realtor Dawn Birch, whom Nana holds a grudge against dating back to their time together in high school, makes a pitch to buy out Birt’s ornament store. While hiding from Beauregard, Zoe finds a notebook containing a recipe for fudge made with shrimp.

Birt later explains his wife Savannah had a dream to make shrimp fudge based on a seafood mole they had in Mexico, but he has never been able to recreate her recipe due to a page missing from the notebook. Birt and Zoe go on a series of outings that continue bringing the two of them closer together.

Santa captures the evil yule log. With help from his assistant Holly, Santa destroys the log in a woodchipper and buries the chips in cement on a Native American burial ground. However, one loose splinter floats away in the air, and Nana later pricks her finger on it.

Zoe has a vision where she enters Birt’s freezer for an encounter with a miniaturized Nana, who says something cryptic to Zoe. Zoe also encounters her dead fiancé Alex, but Alex dismisses her because he is busy boxing with Birt’s wife Savannah in a sparring session.

While bonding with Birt’s son Jaxon, Zoe finds the page missing from Savannah’s shrimp fudge recipe. Zoe and Jaxon recreate the dish, which turns out to be delicious.

Bored with Tanner, Jakester comes by in his repaired car and tells Zoe they can finally leave town. But after Zoe bumps into a Frenchman named Francois, Jakester takes an interest in him and decides to continue staying in Mistletoe.

Birt, Zoe, Jaxon, and Nana host Christmas Eve dinner for Birt’s priest brother Sym Card, his other brother Chris and Chris’s wife Anne, and his sister Val and her husband Joe. At dinner, Zoe and Jaxon surprise Birt by serving Savannah’s shrimp fudge.

Possessed by the yule log splinter, Nana suddenly morphs into a tree monster with a flaming log for its head. Nanamonster impales Sym before going into town for a killing spree during Mistletoe’s annual Yule Log Festival. Mass panic ensues as Nanamonster lights additional logs that becomes sentient and start slaying people too. Dawn Birch and Beauregard’s bodyguard Roger are among those killed in the chaos.

Zoe rescues Beauregard, but she first hears Beauregard tell one of the flying, flaming yule logs to take her instead of him. Birt is saddened to discover Zoe and Beauregard went on a date.

Everyone deduces that destroying Nanamonster will also destroy the individual yule logs. Zoe and Birt rush back home where they hack apart Nana to stop her from killing Jaxon.

Wood chips fall out of Nana’s chopped-up body and reform into another yule log creature. The monster repeatedly slams Zoe’s head against a closet wall, causing Savannah’s ashes to fall from the shelf. Seeing that the ashes harm the creature, Birt and Zoe pour Savannah and Alex’s cremated remains all over the monster, which causes it to disintegrate while the other sentient logs fall harmlessly to the ground across town. However, one twig from the creature remains behind.

The next day, Birt and Jakester, the latter of whom is now in a throuple with Tanner and Francois, receive notes from Zoe, who believes she is cursed and could therefore continue endangering them, apologizing for leaving Mistletoe without telling them. On her drive out of town, Zoe sees another miniaturized vision of Nana that she admonishes for not being clearer about her clue for killing the yule log. Meanwhile, Nana’s notoriety as a monster attracts curious customers whose business saves Birt’s ornament store, which now also serves shrimp fudge.

One month later, Zoe unexpectedly returns for a romantic reunion with Birt. Zoe’s former boss Tatiana arrives to offer Zoe her job back because it turns out the shrimp fudge restores coral. Zoe sees a vision of Nana hooking up with Abraham Lincoln in the afterlife. Zoe and Birt finally kiss underneath mistletoe.

Unbeknownst to everyone, Jaxon secretly nurses the yule log twig under the belief he can bring back Nana. Outside, a man arrives with an alien army that begins marching toward the store.

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Review:

2022’s “Adult Swim Yule Log” (review here) spoofed cozy videos of crackling fireplaces by turning one such serene scene into a humorous horror movie that went from the warmth of burning wood to the wackiness of masked maniacs, cult conspiracies, alien invasions, time-bending dwarves, and of course, a sentient log embarking on a splattery killing spree. Since that setup only works as a one-time gag, creator Casper Kelly had his work cut out for him in coming up with a sequel that doesn’t seem redundant.

What does Kelly do to maintain that madcap mood without flogging a flattened horse? He takes aim at a different target and satirizes Hallmark holiday movies instead. And take it from someone who has seen more of those cable TV comforts than you might imagine, Kelly hits the dead center of the bullseye with the sharpest parody of an idyllic Hallmark Christmas you’ll ever see. “Adult Swim Yule Log 2” earns applause because it’s not only a clever lampoon, it surprisingly doubles as a delightful Hallmark-style movie in its own right, albeit one that’s dementedly twisted in the most entertaining way possible.

When we left Zoe at the end of “Adult Swim Yule Log,” and it really doesn’t matter much if you’ve seen the first film or not, it looked like she and her fiancé Alex were having their skulls smashed in by the evil log. Alex did die, but Zoe miraculously survived. However, Zoe was left so traumatized by the experience that she now carries an ax wherever she goes and often hallucinates flying log attacks at inconvenient moments, one of which causes her to lose her environmentalist office job at a coral conservatory.

What Zoe needs is an intervention from her best friend. According to traditional scripting for a schmaltzy story, the film has three choices for filling out this stereotype. The first two are a sister or an ordinary gal pal, either of whom can be single as long as they’re not more attractive than the lead, but who are usually married with children so their relationship advice has some familial forcefulness behind it.

“Adult Swim Yule Log 2” chooses the third option and goes with an outgoing gay guy, Jakester, to get Zoe back on track. His bright idea is a Mexican getaway for both of them. But wouldn’t you know it, on the drive to their destination, Santa Claus spies the duo from the bushes, cheekily flicks his nose, and his North Pole magic disables their car.

Luckily, Zoe and Jakester are right by an exit for a quaint little town called Mistletoe. Unluckily, their car won’t be fixed anytime soon, and blocked roads mean they’ll be stranded there until after Christmas.

That’s just fine with Jakester, because he hooks up with the tow truck driver, who looks like he just stepped out of his Hollywood headshot. Zoe meets a series of hunky men herself, each of whom she literally bumps into, Sandra Bullock romcom-style, and each of whom looks like he’s ready to strip off the suspenders over his bare chest on a Magic Mike stage.

Picking up Zoe from one of her sidewalk splats is Birt, short for Birthday, because his last name is Card and his parents named their children after folded paper sold by American Greetings. Recently widowed and left to raise his adorable son Jaxon with the boy’s grandmother Nana, Birt runs a small ornament shop that’s in danger of going out of business thanks to a self-centered social media influencer who just brought his bigger ornament store to town.

As Birt, Michael Shenefelt exemplifies how homed in each actor is to the delicate frequency of silliness played seriously that Casper Kelly tunes everyone into. Shenefelt rides a perfect line between an authentic Hallmark love interest and a caricature of an authentic Hallmark love interest. With different lines, he could plug this same performance into an actual Hallmark holiday movie and no one would notice his character came out of a horror/comedy.

Speaking of horror, while these meet-cutes with sexy singles are going on, the yule log stays busy breaking out of an evidence locker, blowing up a police station, and stowing away in the truck of a camping family it later slays while making its way toward Mistletoe. At one point, Santa himself steps in to shred the log in a woodchipper and bury the bits in cement on a Native American burial ground. But the log will not de denied. It’s determined to find the victim that got away, and when it does, a string of slaughter sweeps through Mistletoe that makes the deaths in the first film look like child’s play.

“Adult Swim Yule Log 2” put an ear-to-ear smile on my face that lasted the full 90 minutes. Its flippancy makes it funny while wild plot beats hone an edge of slyness so the film never becomes too goofy to fit within its slick style. Right down to the main couple having a mild misunderstanding with only minutes to go in the movie, every essential element of the Hallmark formula gets skewered with good humor and gory horror.

“Adult Swim Yule Log 2” in two words? “Shrimp fudge.” What else can I do with two words for the film? I don’t know whether to emphasize “this” or “the,” but this is the humorous holiday horror movie you definitely want to enjoy at Christmastime.

Review Score: 90

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