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. 

Motel Hell (1980) Review

Motel Hell (1980) Review

A number of years ago, my cousin and I discovered a sub-genre (more of a sub-sub-genre, really) of horror we can only refer to as “food-related-horror” and have made it a tradition to watch a new one every Thanksgiving. For the final reviews of Schlocktober, I’m going to look at five such films, concluding with the one that started our tradition in the first place. First up is Motel Hell, which is one of the best the sub-sub-genre has to offer.   

Farmer Vincent is quite the entrepreneur. He owns a motel, called Motel Hello (but the O is burnt out, hence the title), and a lucrative sausage business, which he operates on his farm, so he’s also a farmer, and a butcher. His meat is renowned, because as the slogan goes, “It takes all kinds of critters to make farmer Vincent fritters!” But mostly, it just takes people. Vincent and his sister catch innocent victims and bury them up to their necks in their secret garden, cutting their vocal cords out so they can’t scream for help, and keep sacks over their heads to hide them from anyone who might look in on their crop. They feed them, and once they’re ripe, kill them and butcher them. It’s a pretty sick and sadistic premise, but plays out in a pretty comedic fashion. 

Motel Hell is almost a serious horror movie, but not quite. The filmmakers intended for it to be played as straight horror, but like the original Evil Dead, the low budget made it evolve into a horror-comedy hybrid that still managed to be creepy, but also purposefully funny, and just plain campy. A number of moments are meant to be darkly comic, and they mostly work. The heads poking out of the ground gargling is pretty disturbing, but the camera lingers on them too long, to the point of becoming more goofy than scary. 

The characters are all quirky, but the bad ones are also a little menacing at times. At other times, they’re just hilarious. One of the funniest scenes has a kinky couple getting it on in their motel room, and Vincent and his sister enter with the intention to tie them up and take them to their garden, but the couple think they are just into bondage, so welcome them into their room and laugh as they get tied up and gassed. It’s twisted, but hilarious.  

Right from the first five minutes, Motel Hell is entertaining, and continues to be for the majority of its runtime. It all culminates in an epic chainsaw battle between Vincent and his brother, with Vincent wearing a pig mask and laughing maniacally the entire time. Motel Hell is certainly food for thought. 

Dinocroc (2004) Review

Dinocroc (2004) Review

Dinocroc is about a prehistoric dinosaur-like crocodile that escapes a secret lab and terrorizes a small town. It was produced by Roger Corman, famous for having produced and directed numerous low-budget sci-fi and horror films over the years (including Carnosaur), but is not among his most-widely known productions, so why am I talking about it? Somehow, it spawned a little franchise, followed by Supergator and even Dinocroc vs. Supergator. While subsequent films are more in the vein of Sharknado with purposefully bad scripts and effects, Dinocroc actually tries to be more than its little budget allows, which is what makes it so funny to watch. 

The characters are what you would expect: a sheriff, an animal catcher, some shady scientists, a croc expert dressed exactly like Crocodile Dundee, a buffoonish everyday guy (the main character), and his kid brother, who is looking for his lost dog. The cast is made up of bad actors, with two exceptions. One is the sheriff, who’s pretty good, and the other is the main character, played by Matthew Borlenghi, who is unbelievably bad. It’s like he’s drunk or something in most scenes, but he isn’t annoyingly bad, at least. It’s kind of charming how bad he is. 

The “Dinocroc” is apparently supposed to be a hybrid of modern croc and Suchomimus, which was a real dinosaur, but the name on the cage says Sarcosuchus imperator, which was a crocodilian species, but nothing like the primarily-bipedal Dinocroc. Whatever the case, the script rips off all kinds of better sci-fi/horror films, but what’s really outstanding about it is some of the dialogue. It’s as if the screenwriter didn’t know how real humans speak. I don’t want to blame the actors entirely (although they don’t deliver the dialogue well, so I don’t want to give them any credit, either), but it’s really laughable.  

The music is bizarre, with overdone choir singing, I guess in an attempt to make things scarier. A good soundtrack can increase a horror film’s scariness significantly, but in this case, I think they tried too hard. They pull out all the stops when it comes to utilizing monster movie clichés. There’s unwary people getting attacked at the beach, the fake out ending where you think it’s dead but comes back, and they even show the creature’s POV, which uses one of the worst filters I’ve ever seen.  

As for the monster? Well, the image on the DVD doesn’t lie. It’s rendered entirely in terrible cgi. It’s a couple notches above Sharknado-levels of atrocious, but still a far cry from a realistic or cool-looking creature. This Dinocroc loves to swim at high speeds without disturbing the water’s surface, and explode out of the water so fast he barely makes a splash, but of course when it comes to chasing people on land, they have a pretty easy time staying ahead of him. 

Dinocroc is inept, but still entertaining from time to time in a so-bad-it’s-good way. There are a couple entertaining scenes with Dinocroc killing people, some really poor camera work, and the typical final fight to the death. Even for fans of this type of film, though, it’s a disposable one-time watch.