Directed by Kevin Connor
Starring Rory Calhoun, Paul Linke, Nancy Parsons, Nina Axelrod and Wolfman Jack
Quick background info: I've only seen this movie once, on MonsterVision back when Joe Bob was in his prime (so we're talking 1998-ish), and re-watched it or the first time in almost 20 years just a few days ago. Amazingly, I still remembered almost every little story beat and nuance after all these years, a true testament to just how nutty and oddball this movie is.
This is one of those flicks that is truly difficult to categorize. The creators insist that they weren't trying to make a parody. Many years later, having seen the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Psycho a bunch of times, I hereby call bullshit on that one. There's just way too much random weirdness for it to be anything other than a send-up of those two films as well as a handful of others. See that last sentence? That's some grade-A quality reviewing there. All of the goofy stuff aside, it's also a very disturbing movie with some absolutely sickening themes, in between bits where Rory Calhoun turns on his true Farmer Brown charm in the main role of Farmer Vincent (creative naming aplenty in this movie). Because of that, this movie is a little disjointed, with a tone that's all over the place. Kind of like this paragraph. With that, let's get to the movie.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Farmer Vincent, with the aforementioned Calhoun wearing overalls and speaking in a good ol' boy folksy cadence. Almost immediately, we discover what this dude is all about, as he captures motorists that pass his countryside motel (named the "Motel Hello," but with a lightbulb burned out hence the title of the movie) for nefarious purposes. The movie does a good job in the early goings gradually revealing his method and the reason; rather than being a serial or pleasure killer, he does it for profit. Farmer Vincent's smoked meats are known the world over for their delicious flavor. The secret ingredient? Human flesh.
Burying his victims up to their necks in a garden and fattening them up before gutting them, Vincent and his complacent, slightly stupid sister Ida (Nancy Parsons, a slight gem of nuttiness herself, although not quite as good as Calhoun) would probably qualify as the world's most prolific killers if this story were real. The implication is that they've been doing this for a WHILE. Like, decades. One would think authorities would have noticed how many people disappeared around Mudtown, Kentucky or wherever this movie takes place before long, but you don't tune into these movies for biting realism. And if you do...ah, who am I kidding, nobody does.
First of all, what a nightmarish scenario. I mean, seriously. Getting buried in the dirt, having your vocal chords severed and force fed only to be butchered and slaughtered to be sold as meat to the public. One word: BRRRRRRRR. And that's where this movie becomes disjointed, as for the majority of the second act we get...a romance.
Yup, a romance. See, early on, Vincent shoots out the tire of a passing motorcycle, capturing a young couple in the process. He buries the male in his garden but takes the female - a pretty young girl named Terry (Nina Axelrod) - back to the motel. Slowly but surely, Terry actually falls in love with Vincent and his honest country ways. Even as a kid, I found this section of the movie to be pretty weak and unbelievable. This is a movie that, I think, definitely could have benefited from simply going balls-to-the-wall with mayhem and made Farmer Vincent a truly loathsome villain (even more than he is). Also, if it didn't contain this little love story, we would have been left with a more likable hero than we have. It seems like Vincent's brother Bruce (Paul Linke), who also just so happens to be the town Sheriff (and also surprisingly oblivious to the alarming rate of vehicular incidents and disappearances in the area), wants Terry for himself and doesn't take too kindly to the idea of Vincent sweeping her off her feet. And this is why we get our big final showdown.
Yeah, I find Sheriff Bruce to be a pretty whiny and ineffective hero character. But I definitely feel that he COULD have been a cool character had the movie been done differently, and the whole love story aspect been taken out. See, horror movies that focus as heavily on the villain character as this one does is a dicey proposition. If you spend too much time delving into what makes the bad guy tick, it can result in one of two things that you DON'T want in a horror movie: engendering sympathy for the villain, or just making it seem like they're so much deeper and cooler than the victim characters that we cheer for them by proxy. Now, we don't exactly have sympathy for Vincent. He's a pretty damn unrepentant bastard throughout the whole movie. But he is far and away the most charismatic and memorable thing about the movie, for better or worse.
Rory Calhoun's performance here really is something to behold, and it's the saving grace for a movie with a multitude of sins. It's something that everybody should see once in their lifetime, kind of like Christian Bale in American Psycho. I definitely would call the dude likable; not in the least bit, since we see what he does in such graphic detail. But it's a truly one-of-a-kind creation, the sort of thing that can only exist in a genre where an undead zombie mask-wearing psycho can spawn a feature film franchise with soon-to-be 13 movies. Oh, and it has a pretty damn awesome finale featuring a chain saw duel (seriously) and the garden of human victims staging a rebellion worthy of George Washington himself, ending with a moment of pure cheer-out-loud catharsis. And Rory Calhoun's final line is simply amazing.
*** out of ****. Folks, this is a movie with a lot of problems. Fortunately, it's strengths are so strong that it becomes a must-see movie. Check it out.
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