Director: David Ferino
Cast: Myrna Velasco, Zachary Roozen, Noor Razooky, Dan Bakkedahl, Daniel Roebuck, Paul Bates, Eric Allen Kramer, Samantha Bailey, Eric Roberts, Catherine Corcoran
Screenplay: Costa Dillon, J. Stephen Peace
96 mins. Rated PG-13 for language, some violent content and suggestive material.

I’ve always been a fan of slapstick satire/parody films when done right, going back to Airplane! & The Naked Gun. I’ve also been enamored with the disaster films of the 1970s ever since I discovered them. It’s that confluence of ideals that has led to my complete adoration of the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes franchise. Spawning four feature film entries and a short-lived children’s animated series across its five decades, I had assumed that the franchise was complete. After all, availability of the later sequels has been patchy at best for some time now. I was only able to see the films on used secondhand DVDs which can become quite costly. I guess I had just come to the conclusion that the franchise was over, or at least dormant. Turns out, you just can’t keep a rotten tomato out of commission for long and now, the Killer Tomatoes have struck again with a legacy sequel that hearkens back to the franchise’s indie roots and style for a goofy and irreverent follow-up that should make longtime fans happy, though I’m concerned about its ability to bring in new viewers.

It’s been decades since the original tomato uprising took place, and in that time the US government took the original documentary film and labeled it as satirical fiction in order to cover-up the events. With the invention of the Mytomato, the vegetables have infiltrated everyday life, but an intrepid group of individuals including original savior Wilbur Finletter (Dan Bakkedahl, This is 40) have gathered to keep this organic intelligence from taking over the world, and this time, the tomatoes are bigger, meaner, and a lot juicier.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: Organic Intelligence feels the closest to the original that we’ve gotten thus far. The smaller budget makes for a lot of ingenuity, and longtime writing team Costa Dillon and J. Stephen Peace have infused a number of new genre tropes into their latest sendup that tackles AI, untrustworthy government secrets, and espionage fare that often had me giggling throughout. Your mileage may vary as this is a very specific type of comedy that won’t work for everyone, but I quickly found my footing with the slapstick and sometimes groan-inducing gags that worked for me more often than not.

This legacy sequel has two big barriers to entry with the aforementioned comedy stylings being something not often utilized in current comedy trends being the first; the second is the plot. Spoof films are a lot like film noir in that they don’t necessarily need a good plot. In the case of film noir, it’s all about the style, whereas spoof films have plots that often feel like joke-delivery systems. While the best spoofs have plots that often feel like, without the jokes, they could fit within the genre quite nicely, the Killer Tomatoes franchise has always played a little fast and loose, embracing the goofiness but also playing their simplistic plots with earnestness. In the case of Organic Intelligence, the plotting feels overly convoluted. Perhaps this is intentional, as that is sometimes the case with conspiracy thrillers and governmental secrets, which this sequel is pulling from, but I think too much time is spent moving the plot along instead of simplifying elements to allow the comedy gags to flourish. Because of the plot-forward storytelling, some of the characters get short-changed.

The best characters in Organic Intelligence are made by actors that are more closely aligned with the original’s release, ones that would have more knowledge of the semi-dormant spoof subgenre, like Daniel Roebuck (Final Destination), Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight), and David Koechner. The standouts of the film come from Dan Bakkedahl taking over the role of franchise hero Wilbur Finletter and Paul Bates (True Romance) as master of disguise & attorney-at-law Sam Smith. Bakkedahl had a thankless task of taking over the only major legacy character of the franchise, originally played by screenwriter J. Stephen Peace. Bakkedahl makes the most of the character, giving Finletter a harder edge similar to most aged heroes like Han Solo and Indiana Jones without sacrificing any of his zanier antics. Bates plays a new character, a master of disguise who tricks only the characters in the film. Seeing Bates get a chance to really flex some comedic chops here is wonderful. I’d seen him in films like Coming to America and True Romance and so many classics, but he really gets to play in the sandbox here, and I hope we continue to see this type of energy from Paul Bates in the future. Most of the cast, but particularly the older actors, really commit to the bit here, and that commitment heightens the humor.

Now it might seem like I’m criticizing Organic Intelligence, but I have to say that I found this movie to be very funny. It’s the type of humor I grew up with, watching Leslie Nielsen comedies with my parents, and a lot of this humor hearkens back to the roots of the franchise. Not all the jokes work, but there are so many of them shooting across the screen that more of them work than the ones that don’t, and when the jokes didn’t land, it didn’t matter as much because another was on the way.

The pacing is also great, flowing from scene to scene, allowing the humor to come from a number of different angles and sources. I particularly loved the scenes of Koechner as Press Secretary Tim Richardson trying to downplay the government’s ineptitude at dealing with the menace and Finletter’s secret coalition trying to unveil the dangerous conspiracy. Any references to the original film as documentary footage is wonderful, and any mention of “Puberty Love” or Professor Gangreen’s experiments made me so happy. The film even opens by quoting George Orwell of all people and sending up this nearly apocalyptic energy and then immediately plays into slasher tropes. It’s dumb fun, but I was smiling and laughing through most of it.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: Organic Intelligence may be a hard sell for potential new fans. After all, the franchise has been relatively dormant for a couple decades, and its strongest entries were half a lifetime ago (hell, have any of these kids even heard the seminal classic “Puberty Love” or seen the iconic film Big Breasted Girls Go to the Beach and Take Their Tops Off or not?). The humor is uncommon in the modern landscape, but I had a blast with this legacy comedy sequel. I’d advise curious viewers to check out at least the original film and maybe even its first sequel to decide if this type of comedy works for them (and it will help with some of the newer films references and context), but this quirky, low-budget schlockfest worked quite well for me, taking in elements of espionage films, AI fears, and governmental overreach to combine with the disaster film antics. The plot if a little too plotting and some of the characters get short-changed (and I wish the finale had been more practical-effects-focused), but the entertainment value of Organic Intelligence was pretty high for me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my Mytomato has been acting up, and I need to look into why.

3½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more Killer Tomatoes: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Return of the Killer Tomatoes