Microwave Massacre

My friend and I got bored last night so we decided to watch a movie my Dad had bought for me from a yard sale. 3 guesses what movie it was. Anywho. Right off we knew it was bad. And then I realized I had heard about this movie from badmovies.org. Lauren and I are strange, I think. We enjoyed the movie. We laughed and cried. We cried because it was so painful to watch, but enjoyable at the same time, go figure! This is definitely a party movie to lighten the mood. Maybe have a some finger food around for atmosphere *grin*

Filmed several years ago and finally emerging as a homevideo release, "Microwave Massacre" is an amateurish comedy dwelling on cannibalism in its lampooning of gory horror films. Vaguely resembling the spoof-of-a-spoof "Please Don't Eat My Mother" (a takeoff on "Little Shop of Horrors" made a decade earlier), this film is suited for fanciers of grotesque black humor only.

Standup comic Jackie Vernon toplines as a mild construction worker Donald, engaged in Bickersons-style arguments with his stout wife May (Claire Ginsberg), especially over her penchant for inedible gourmet repasts prepared in her large microwave oven. In a rage, he kills her, and cuts the body into pieces (including a very cheap plaster head) and stores them neatly wrapped in aluminum foil with the frozen meat.

When Donald accidentally nibbles on one of his wife's hands for a midnight snack, he discovers he likes the taste and begins cooking the human flesh in the microwave, sharing the results at lunch with his friendly co-workers. Now, a bachelor again, he starts picking up pretty girls, but ends up killing them while having sex and eating the corpses.

Filmmaker Wayne Berwick, Thomas Singer and Craig Muckler overplay this material for cheap laughs, with mugging actors including the usual deadpan Vernon. Gore is very fake-looking, aiming at viewers laughing at the production rather than being outraged by realism. Emphasizing vulgar gags and slowing down dialog delivery results in an embarrassing, generally unfunny exercise, punctuated by the usual quota of female nude shots.

Budget is microscopic, with passable technical credits. In explaining Donald's final comeuppance (yes, even in amoral farragoes such as this there lurks some form of retribution), picture briefly intimates a supernatural element, but this is not enough to attract the interest of traditional horror film fans.

My review was written after watching the film on a Midnight videocassette.

Is MM a good movie? No. Did I enjoy watching it? Yes.

This is one of those films that falls into the "B minus"-movie category. It's sincere in being what it is, but what it is is a lot of schlock.

Oddly, Jackie Vernon is probably one of the weakest parts of this film. His portrayal of a middle-aged blue-collar schlub is just not convincing. (Hmmm...as if any of the other actors are convincing.) I/m sure that this film probably wouldn't have been made at all if he hadn't been attached to the project, but he's just not very good/interesting/funny in his role.

On the bright side, the producers somehow managed to scrape together quite a few pretty good-looking women and get them to take their tops of. In fact, I'm rather surprised that Marla Simons didn't go on to do more films after this one, even if this would have been due to her assets rather than her acting. The nudity in this film is silly rather than titillating and I personally would have given it a PG-13 rating.

Everybody else in the film acts as if they're in a sketch on the Carol Burnett Show, mugging and over-reacting. Some of the jokes and one-liners are pretty funny, just don't expect any real acting. Oh, yeah...and it's not at all scary or even gross.

The only big question that I had after watching this was, "How did the huge, industrial microwave fit into that little shipping box that you see in the beginning of the movie?" Recommended for people who are tired of artsy-fartsy horror films.

Far from being the worst horror film of all time, and really not much of a horror movie at all but more of a black comedy for lack of a better description. Jackie Vernon plays Donald whose wife refuses to give him solid, working-man food but rather inundates his lunch box with crab sandwiches and other gourmet meals. Donald gets so upset after a night of drinking his woes that he slays his wife and then packs her in the freezer, later goes for a bite to eat, and unwittingly eats her hand wrapped in tin foil. From there he realizes he loves the taste and begins to eat women all the time(yes, that pun and every possible one under the sun was used in the film!). Thereis an endless parade of one-liners, many just wretched, but after a bit I was finding some of them amusing as this film is trying to be nothing more than a sophomoric horror spoof. It has a seventies feel to it though it was made in 1983. The scary moments are non-existent. What do we get: roly-poly Jackie Vernon quipping wisecracks as he searches for dinner and a date all in one. Vernon is just, well, there. He quite honestly doesn't have much of a movie presence, but he can deliver his lines - if you can be more unlike me and get past the voice of Frosty the Snowman swearing and having his way with a prostitute and even stuffing a turkey. The gal that plays his wife is amusing if nothing else, and the rest of the cast could be extras on Lost for all we know/care. There are a few exceptions because the film has liberal doses of gratuitous nudity - no more eye-popping then the opening with the knothole girl. A real looker and possibly the high point of this film. More is the pity. that being said; however, Microwave Massacre is watchable - even again in the next decade possibly. seeing Vernon act is intriguing as we have little of him in film(I wonder why?). You could definitely do a lot worse than this. I have seen horror films that made my eyes glaze over from boredom and wished/willed my fingers to pass the fast forward. This strangely enough for me was not one of those times.

Described by its original DVD distributor as "The Worst Horror Movie of All Time", this 1983 black comedy doesn't quite live up to that promise, but it's a close thing. The painted cover art is fantastic, and typically unrepresentative of the lousy content of the film.

Donald (Jackie Vernon) is a depressed, disillusioned construction worker who returns each evening to his frumpy, nagging wife, May (Claire Ginsberg). She feels she doesn't get the gratitude she deserves for "slaving away" at her new microwave all day.

One night Donald snaps and murders May. Naturally, the only way he can destroy the evidence is by cooking and eating her. He gets a taste for it (excuse the pun) and thus begins enticing ladies of the night back to his suburban home. He cooks them and feeds them to his insatiable, ignorant co-workers. Donald is free and he's impressing his new best buddies. What can possibly stop his campaign of cannibalism? Vernon was a stand-up with a distinctive deadpan style, which is entirely incongruous with the farcical events of this story. Combined with the film's weirdly languid pace and Leif Horvath's eerie electronic score, it's quite an unsettling experience – although this is mostly due to it being an outright tonal disaster, rather than any controlled sense of atmosphere.

With the humour and delivery of a 70s sketch show, it's a movie badly in need of canned laughter, if only to inform us of when we're supposed to laugh. Genuine humour comes in the briefest of snatches: Donald's encounter with Dr Van der Fool (Ed Thomas), who doesn't know which side the heart is on; or the scene where May's sister stops by and Donald has to prop May's disembodied head in the bed to pretend she's still alive ("She looks awful pale...").

It's a movie of a mercifully bygone era in which all the women are nags or sluts, although this is par for the course in trash horror of the time. What the flesh sandwich lacks is a juicy layer of satire. Given that the microwave was just becoming a household essential in the 80s, promising the death of the conventional cooker, this has to go down as an opportunity missed – we get none of the consumerist satire of The Stuff, nor the grotesque farce of the more enjoyably outrageous Street Trash.

Microwave Massacre just about claws its way into the midnight movie slot through a certain uniqueness and, frankly, its brevity (it comes in at around 75 minutes). But it's more of a freak-out than a fun time.