Microwave Massacre (1983) Review

Microwave Massacre (1983) Review

Donald is a construction worker, and he’s upset, because his horrible wife May keeps making him weird, inedible lunches. Finally, he snaps and beats her to death with a salt shaker (but not before pouring some in his hand and throwing it over his shoulder for good luck) and shoves her in their brand-new giant microwave. He accidentally eats one of her arms, and discovers she actually tastes pretty good, so he cuts her up and puts her in the freezer. When he runs out of May lunches, he starts luring young women home to butcher, but not before screwing them first. Prior to killing and eating May, he hadn’t been getting laid by her, or anyone else, but with his new appetite for human flesh comes a sexual resurgence. 

Microwave Massacre is one of the strangest and trashiest food-fuelled horror-comedies ever made. The opening credits play over close-ups of a woman with big breasts walking down the street, then when the credits conclude, she gets to a construction site and is pushed up against a fence by some random dude on the street, who seems to start having sex with her, but it’s hard to tell because that side of the fence isn’t shown again. Instead, we see her breasts pushed out of her shirt and through a hole in the fence, which the construction workers ogle at—except for Donald, who’s too preoccupied with his crab sandwich: a sandwich that literally has a whole, intact crab on it (and the crab is very clearly a plastic toy one). So, yes, this movie is absolutely sleazy and trashy, but at least they’re up front about it. 

The acting is spectacularly bad. Every line sounds like it lands wrong. The woman who plays May is especially bad and over-the-top. I don’t really blame Donald for doing what he did. Jackie Vernon plays Donald, who many children remember fondly as the original voice of Frosty the Snowman in the animated holiday TV special. It’s just so bizarre to hear Frosty’s voice while at the same time a stripper awkwardly dances in the background. And yes, there’s lots of nudity beyond the first scene.   

There’s this strange lethargy to Microwave Massacre that I’m not sure I can fully explain. I think it may be largely due to Vernon’s performance. He just sort of sleep walks through the whole movie. It never really builds to anything, Donald just keeps stumbling into one weird situation after another. Some of the gags are, admittedly, pretty funny. There’s a moment where Donnie is spreading what at first looks like whip cream on a naked woman, and she’s all “oh yeah, that’s kinky, I like it” but then you realize it’s mayonnaise and he lays a human-sized piece of bread on top of her and cuts her in half with a giant knife. 

Microwave Massacre has all the subtlety of a freight train. Early in the film, as Donald and his coworkers are walking into the bar, he remarks that he hasn’t eaten anything good in a long time. He opens the door, and accidentally walks face-first into the crotch of a young woman standing on a step stool. While some of the jokes work, many of them fall flat, or are funny because of how un-funny the execution is. Toward the end, the comedy gets played out and it just gets exhausting. The effects for the gore and body parts are really bad, and nothing particularly violent is shown. It’s definitely played primarily for laughs, not scares. 

So, Microwave Massacre. Do I recommend it or not recommend it? I shall do neither. I think I’ve said enough for you to determine if this is worth watching or not. As far as cannibal films go, there are no others quite like this one.