The Corpse Grinders

What happens when dead corpses are ground into meat and added to grain for a canned cat food factory is the heart of what The Corpse Grinders is all about. It turns out that this canned cat food has an effect on the cats, having given them the taste of eating man, now instinctually placing within them the desire to eat more human flesh....dead or alive. Pussy cats all over Southern California begin their preying on human owners due to their newly initiated killer man-eating instinct(Hey, I didn't make this up...it's the explanation used in the film!). Ted V. Mikels is responsible for this low-budget film geared at repulsing the audience rather than scaring it. Mikels tries to pull off a Herschell Gordon Lewis shocker here, and is, well, fairly successful. Yep, there is real bad acting. None of the actors looks sincere, but there are a couple of real hot babes. One is the much talked about secretary that disrobes to panties and bra and watches TV with a can of beer prior to being attacked. Monika Kelly plays the inebriated doctor's very busty blonde nurse who seemingly needs to change every time she goes out. Ok, I can live with it if I must. The rest of the "cast" is a who's who's of amateurish performers. Caleb and his dotty English-accented wife are truly some of the most ridiculous characters to be seen in any film. He goes around barking orders like someone totally unrehearsed in the art of stagecraft while she clutches a baby doll and screams being chased in one scene, stopping long enough for her attacker to hear her and then begins to scream again. Sanford Mitchell as the lead, the head of the factory, is just awful. These performances are not real boring though. They are so bad that they are very amusing to watch and that really sums up this film in a nutshell. It is very, very, very bad and yet a real hoot to sit through. I thought I was in for another snooze-fest like Astro-Zombies before sitting down to The Corpse Grinders, but I was pleasantly surprised. This film is nothing like that film other than it is equally very cheaply and ineptly made, but it has far more interesting scenes and is what is known as a "so bad it is good" film.

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 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 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.