Cannibales

My review was written in January 1989 after watching the feature on Tapeworm video cassette.

This 1986 film with a not-so-catchy title is aimed at the lower end of the gore market and offers little of interest to traditional horror fans.

Aping, with little skill, Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", film concerns a clan of backwoods California dunderheads who prey on passersby, eating their flesh and selling leftovers to suppliers in town to be made into luncheon meat.

Kim McKamy (who deserves better than her recent string of roles in cheapies like this one) and her pals are on a weekend vacation when they're spotted by the geeks and attacked. Poorly paced film has this occurring early on, with anticlimax final reels of attempted escape and gruesome confrontations.

In-fighting dialog among the young heroes and heroines en route to their date with the meat cleaver is relentlessly boring. Gore content is nauseating for the uninitiated but pointless and unimaginative for the young gorehounds out there in video land. Corny payoff has the backward Benny taking revenge on his sadistic daddy (i.e., "Paw") after set-up scenes of the old man whipping him mercilessly.

Technical credits are extremely crude, especially in the editing of unmatched footage.

A truly lame film. The box depicts a freaky looking redneck covered in blood eating a severed arm, the scene does not appear in the movie!!! Most of the movie contained scenes of a bunch of redneck retards chasing people through the woods, with little gore. A total waste of time!

Here, we have the typical slasher flick set-up. A group of kids set out on a nice trip in the woods get ambushed by a group of red-neck maniacs.

While I can admit this film was very poorly made, it still managed to be entertaining. The acting is about as bad as it gets and there is a severe lack of character development. It's one of those flicks where you have nothing to do so you slap this movie in your VCR. What this movie is, basically is just mindless fun. Not a classic in any way shape or form but somehow manages to entertain.

'Lunch Meat' is not for everyone but for those of you lucky(unlucky?) enough to get a hold of this rare b-horror flick, you just may be surprised.

I give it 6 red-necks out of 10.

One of my all-time favorite hobbies is collecting VHS tapes. Sure, it's not as fun now that all the major rental stores have either been shut down or don't carry the format anymore, but it's still fun to browse online. On that note, any self-respecting VHS collector knows one of the rarest finds is a big box VHS of 1987's LUNCH MEAT.

A group of fun-loving teenagers decide to head up to a cabin in the woods for the weekend. However, the gang encounters a backwoods, cannibal family looking to chop them up and sell their meat to the local hamburger joint. Will anyone survive?

Indeed, will anyone survive the grating experience that is the unbelievably inept LUNCH MEAT? I know I did, but just barely. Honestly, this is one of the only films I've come across that nearly fails on all levels, both in actual quality and genuine entertainment. However, a few bits of cheesy goodness put it one or two levels above the bottom of the barrel.

The people who made this obviously had no idea what they were doing, which is blatantly obvious because of how poorly executed everything in this movie is. The acting is horrible and these people are clearly friends and family of the director (it does have Ashlyn Gere, who starred in one of my favorite cheesy slashers, 1986's EVIL LAUGH). Also, I have to throw in that one character sounded a lot like Roger from the show American DAD.

The biggest problem I have with LUNCH MEAT is the chase. Here's the case: first, we get thirty minutes of hilarious character development (hilarious for the wrong reasons, of course). Then we get a forty minute long chase scene that's just that: people running around. Nothing happens except PEOPLE. RUNNING. AWAY. It has to be one of the most excruciating things I've had to sit through in a while.

The film does have the occasional fun and/or funny moment, but they are few and far between. For the burger stand, they just put a white sign reading "So-and-So's Burgers" on the side of a run-down building in downtown Detroit (or some other place). Some of the character interactions are amusing as well. Once the final couple begins to fight back, the pace picks up considerably, but it resorts back to mediocrity after a while.

Overall, I don't want to say LUNCH MEAT is worth watching, but I don't want to advise anyone to avoid it at all costs. It has its fun moments, but the painful-to-watch middle section is enough to scare anyone away. Also, for a film to sell itself as a really gruesome movie filled with carnage, there isn't a whole lot of bloodshed. In fact, I might even say I enjoyed CANNIBAL CAMPOUT more than this. It's that bad.

My advice: If you stumble upon it by chance, watch it once just to say you did. Then throw it in the trash.

Grainy photography, mean-spirited violence. a lo-fi soundtrack, assorted irritating city folk being systematically offed by foul-mouthed, gap-toothed rednecks: Lunchmeat has all of the ingredients I would expect to find in any self-respecting backwoods B-movie, but with an overwhelming sense of cheapness, amateurish direction, dreadful acting, and most of the deaths occurring off-screen, I doubt this one will be featured on many people's 'Top Ten list of Hillbilly Horror'.

Unsurprisingly taking its cues from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the film sees several young adults falling foul of a family of bloodthirsty maniacs who intend to turn their victims into burger meat. With much of the film consisting of a tedious, drawn-out game of cat and mouse between the terrified townies and their inbred assailants, interspersed with the occasional nasty-but-not-all-that-gory killing, this one soon gets extremely boring; even a cannibalistic man-child on the loose and porn star-to-be Ashlyn Gere as one of the victims (credited here as Kim McKamy and sporting a particularly nasty paw-print sweater), Lunchmeat is simply too derivative, too inept and too dull to make the (cold) cut.