Die Leichenmühle

THE CORPSE GRINDERS is a film that wallows in its own cheesyness, and that's meant as a compliment! On a bigger budget it would have been just another lackluster horror flick, but with its meager budget the premise works. Seems a maker of pricey gourmet cat food needs a cheap ingredient source and turns to buying corpses from a corrupt gravedigger. The cats who eat the food turn psycho and attack their human masters and eat their flesh. A doctor and his blonde nurse play detectives and try to find out why the cats are attacking. The acting is pretty lame coming from some of the actors(the guy playing Landau, the head procurer of corpses for the cat food people, seems to think menace can be conveyed by whispering in a flat monotone), and the corpse grinding machine looks like it was constructed by 8th graders, but the real joy of this film is Ann Noble, writer and star of the film SINS OF RACHEL, as the gravedigger's wigged-out(and bewigged)wife. Noble wanders in and out of the movie, toting a grimy, naked doll that she talks to and feeds soup, and ultimately meets an untimely end at the hands of Landau and his crony. An odd character in a film otherwise populated by standard types.

The Corpse Grinders is about as cheap and gritty as you'd expect, which is actually the best thing I can say about it. Even the worst low budget films of this era have that cheesy charm built into the celluloid itself.

As best I can figure out, The Corpse Grinders is about people who use human bodies to make cat food and then the cats that eat it turn into bloodthirsty monsters, attacking people at random as two boring scientist-type people try to figure it out.

The acting is as awful as you'd imagine, there's no pace to speak of, and at less than 75 minutes, it feels like it's at least an hour too long. Most of the film isn't even enjoyable on a "so bad, it's good" level. Don't waste your time.

If you're going to watch movies like this, you have to expect a certain amount of stupidity. You can't question why a surgeon and his nurse/lover spend all their time acting like forensic scientists and cops. You can't question why a cat food factory would leave it's door unlocked all night or why it would have purple and green lights inside.You just have to roll with it. A cat food company that puts humans in its product is a decent idea. The story can get a bit slow at times and maybe you can easily predict what's going to happen but for a fifty year old low budget horror flick, it's not really that bad. I loved that they had a one legged, deaf mute ginger working there. That's was awesome. Not to mention the poster in the owners office that says "Cat Food For Cats Who Like People". That made me chuckle every time I saw it. If you like horror movies, you have to give this a chance.

the best part of this movie is the deaf nurse. the actress obviously doesn't know sign language, so her solution is to act out random hand movements that sort of look like sign language. i find that hilarious.

Cheap effects and bad acting ruin what could have been a drive-in classic.

Warren Ball's over the top performance was amusing though. And did anyone notice Sanford Mitchell's constantly changing accent? I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be British or Brooklyn.

The machine itself was probably a trash picked fridge box.

Getting nearly all of the young actresses to do typical cheesecake poses kept this film from getting boring, but it didn't really help much.

The leads were OK. Only OK.

But this was a good idea that just was in the wrong hands. I wonder what a Romero or a Fulci could have done with this.

Worth one (and only one) look.