Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Let's Eat!: Microwave Massacre

Microwave MassacreThis half cooked (pardon the pun) idea of a horror film is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, but one of the most fun movie experiences I’ve ever taken part of. The DVD box hails the film as the “worst horror movie of all time,” and they are pretty darn close.

Poor old Jackie Vernon plays Donald, a construction worker who absolutely hates his wife’s “gourmet” cooking. The movie begins with breasts. After talking about food, you'd expect I was referring to chicken. You'd be wrong. In what I can only imagine was a cheap ploy to hook the audience, a pair of breasts attached to a porn-caliber actress walk down the street. Inter-cut is Donald, who is on his lunch break. His fellow co-workers and friends have “regular” food for their lunch, but in all his wife’s culinary wisdom she’s made Donald a wonderful crab sandwich – shell and all. The crab is so fake, I'm surprised they were able to find bread large enough to encompass it since it's about the size of a pizza pie. So back to the young actress with “assets.”

The poor young lass stumbles across a construction site, and decides to peer through a hole in the wall, well it's not so much a hole as two round holes, like a funny shaped knothole. Apparently for a by-passer on the street, the mere fact she’s slightly bent over leads him to take advantage of her – and to be perfectly honest – playfully rapes her, much to the delight of two useless bums that work there, and miss out on getting a feel as she escapes. But wait, there's more. This all happens in the first 5 minutes.

Trying to pawn off his food day after day, his buddy declines the crab, explaining that “Sir, no sir! I remember those films in the army. I don't want anything to do with crabs!” in the most monotone, bland acting that I’ve seen in ages. Even *I* could read lines better than that and I can barely string together more than a sentence or two that I've practiced and planned. Eventually, to Donald's horror, his wife buys a microwave. Being a film that was shot in the 70s, the microwave is about the size of a standard oven. The house also has four ovens in that kitchen. God help Donald. So what does she concoct you might ask? Well only the most vile, nasty looking food I’ve seen in cinema history – worse than live, moving Klingon food. Klingons eat slimy, marinated worms while they're still alive and squirming. I think I could stomach that over this stuff. So it's not a surprise that Donald is about to snap. All he wants is a bologna sandwich. After an argument that we didn't really need to see filmed, Donald finally implodes and solves his marital problems in one or two fell swoops.

The next morning he wakes up not realizing what had transpired the evening before, and goes into the kitchen to see where his “lunch” is. He needs to leave for work so he guesses it might be in the microwave. Apparently not only is the microwave huge, it’s large enough to fit people in it. Yep, his wife has been placed in the microwave. Only half disgusted, and hardly worried, Donald ends up having to cut up the body and decides to store in the fridge.

To make room, he dumps all the crummy food she kept into the trash. He’s watching a TV show later, and the “host” is talking about a perfect crime – in which the closest a person got was eating all the evidence. Hungry from all the legalese the disembodied voice from the TV provided, Donald heads to the trash for a quick midnight snack. He goes straight to the food left in the trash, which may be more appetizing after being left to fester all day in the warm garage. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t notice the poorly placed hand of his dead wife fall out of the fridge into the trashcan earlier in the day, and begins to eat the foil wrapped treat. “MAY!” He screams when he realizes that it was her. Still not disgusted enough with himself, he realizes she tastes pretty good, and the following scene is Donald munching on what I can only guess is her leg.

Cue the “knothole girl” from earlier, who now has snuck into the construction site, I guess to return to the place of the crime that occurred earlier. Is she smart? No, I don’t believe so.

Well, now that Donald craves the taste of human flesh, the rest of the film is pretty much made up of vignettes where the end result is him stocking up his fridge with more meat. The jokes range from poor stereotypical jokes to simply poor jokes. Donald’s co-workers joke that the meat is darker – she was black – and later Donald jokes about “Peking Chick” – much to the chagrin of his buddies trying to tell him it’s actually “Peking Duck.”

Between poorly edited scenes that don’t fit in the film at all – mind you the film is only 75 minutes long – it could have been edited down to the length of an old Tales from The Crypt episode, Crypt Keeper monologues and all. However, the movie is a riot, a laugh a minute, whether it was intentional or not. So watch it and laugh. Laugh I tell you!

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