VIDEO ODDITIES #2: Microwave Massacre, part II

The film this most reminds me of is the late 60's Drive-In classic The Undertaker and His Pals. In one of the first scenes of that film, the picture of an unfortunate victim's sailor-boyfriend sitting on the dresser constantly changes from one goofy expression to the next, reacting to her murder and (non-consensual) leg amputation by murderous bikers who intend to cook and serve her up at a local diner. This joke is subversive and surrealistic, and it works: it doesn't take you out of the movie. Undertaker even goes the pun route, having its villains list the victim - Sally Lamb - as "leg of lamb" on the menu. Yet every grating pun and screwball-sex comedy element of Microwave Massacre moves it further from tenability (and enjoyment). To be fair, I did enjoy one exchange when Donald goes to the store and has the following exchange with the irritable clerk:

"You wouldn't happen to have any six-foot cookie sheets would you?"
"No sir, we're fresh out of that popular size."

Berwick and HIS pals are clearly not idiots: they have ideas about what's funny, and even a scintilla of a notion of what might be considered disturbing to some people. What they are is too smart for their own good: the humor in a woman being beaten to death with a salt shaker is inherent, we get why the idea is funny. But these guys find it necessary to have Donald stop mid-beating and throw some salt over his shoulder. Thank you for pointing out the ludicrousness of the situation fellas, I almost missed it! Every murder has some kind of outrageous joke involved, whether it be the hooker ridiculously named "Dee Dee Dee" (her mother had a stutter) or the nagging sister-in-law who gets left tied to a chair in a closet gagged with a piece of bread for the entire second half of the movie (I will give continuity props for the bread getting moldier each time the closet door is opened.) The reason comedy works in successful horror films is that it's comedy placed amidst the horror, and scenes of people being attacked should have weight to them even when there's a joke involved. Here there's nothing, because the people involved don't give a shit.

The performances are no help: everyone takes it to the nth level of camp except for Jackie Vernon, who sleepwalks through scenes and stumbles through lines. I guess I can understand why a guy who used to open for Judy Garland (see Appendix) wasn't willing to bring his A-game to a movie called Microwave Massacre, but his entire presence only punctuated the movie's self-referential disinterest. To be fair though, I'm sure the director asked very little of him beyond that. His voice did sound familiar tho...

The history of horror filmmaking is plagued by producers and directors who seem to have zero knowledge of the genre. They somehow think that nobody has ever combined comedy and horror before them, and that the best way to do it is through some kind of slapstick or parody of what they think horror films are, a kind of detached coyness typical of that early 80's video market era. The studio behind Allen Smithee's Student Bodies (1981) came up with a poster that proclaimed "At last the world's first comedy horror movie!" as if Abbott and Costello never pissed their pants in the shadow of Karloff's Frankenstein, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were never Scared Stiff, or - more importantly - Roger Corman hadn't been incorporating comedy into his horror films for years in classics like A Bucket of Blood and The Raven. What better way to describe 1929's Un Chien Andalou than the greatest comedy-horror movie of all time? Even the year Student Bodies was released was rife with horror-comedies of varying goofballity: Full Moon High, Hotel Hell, An American Werewolf in London, Saturday the 14th and of course The Evil Dead. The next year, 1982, would see the big studio idea of a tribute to campy horror (Creepshow) and a tribute to B-movies that stood on its own (lack of) legs, Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case. And the year after that came Microwave Massacre, a film that decided it was forging into uncharted territory by adding comedy into the macabre mix.

Shortly after there was Re-Animator, Night of the Creeps, Bad Taste (also with jokey cannibalism), Evil Dead 2...as recently as Shaun of the Dead and Slither it's been made clear that comedy is synonymous with the horror film. The dymanics of the two genres are compatible, and it works when it isn't used as an insecure attempt to downplay the absurdity of the plot. To directors who'd say "Yeah well sorry what do you want, it's a movie about a modern cannibal-serial killer! It's got the word 'massacre' in the title, it's not supposed to be, you know, good" my response is, why don't you check out a little film from 1974 about modern cannibal-serial killers that also has the word 'massacre' in its title and manages to be terrifying while also having plenty of (intentionally) funny moments, all playing it absolutely straight without undermining its audience? It happens to be one of the best films ever made.

Sure enough, the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing. The new dvd release of the film*, apart from featuring decidely less-inspired cover art, trumpets in letters bigger than the title "The worst horror movie of all time!" Though it might seem playfully self-deprecating, it's actually just arrogant: how dare they make such a claim? Do they really think this is a more enjoyably bad movie than Manos: The Hands of Fate? The films of Ed Wood, Al Adamson and Hershell Gordon Lewis? Troll 2? Come on guys.

Still, this movie's got its cult. They've canonized one of the horrible puns ("I'm so hungry I could eat a whore") and indeed seem thrilled that this is the guy who voiced Frosty the Snowman. To these people I can only say, "see more movies."

A few interesting things about Jackie Vernon: he was a raunchy Vegas stand-up comic who had a reputation for being "The King of Deadpan," said to have influenced the likes of Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg. He appeared regularly on Ed Sullivan, was a constant fixture of the dais in several Friars Club Roasts and opened for Judy Garland. And as previously mentioned he voiced Frosty the Snowman in the 1969 Rankin/Bass TV show and later in the special Frosty's Winter Wonderland where he chimed the semi-famous Frosty catchphrase "Happy Birthday!" He died of a heart attack four years after Microwave Massacre was released, which makes the heart attack sequence in this film a little quesy to think about in retrospect.