Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation Two

This most recent installment of the fairly popular Sick and Twisted franchise certainly lives up to its title. Unfortunately, the majority of these cartoons fail to tickle the funny bone as intended. Of course, there are some exceptions, but most of the shorts here are simply in love with their own grotesqueries. Unlike, say, the early films of John Waters, these animators provide little wit or imagination to accompany their admittedly strong images, as if graphically animated sex and violence was in itself so humorous a concept that it required no artistic embellishment to get laughs. To make matters worse, many of the shorts are surprisingly mean-spirited, like the pointless, mindless sadism of the humorless “Little Yellow Bird,” which consists of nothing more than a little girl singing a whimsical nursery rhyme while smashing the titular yellow bird into bloody pieces with a hammer. Only the few episodes manage the desired effect, which is to have you both disgusted and cackling at the same time.