The Corpse Grinders

source: The Corpse Grinders

NO redeeming qualities what so ever. Deserving to be called one of the world's worst movies. Directed by Ted V. Mikels and co-written by Arch Hall Jr. Get the hint yet? Talk about a low budget; how about NO budget. Yes, that bad. A creepy tale of a factory whose cat food transforms mild mannered felines into man-eating beasts. Trying to act in this movie are Sean Kenney, Warren Ball, Sanford Mitchell and the busty Monika Kelly. Fun to hoot and holler at!

The Lotus Cat Food company are facing financial ruin, until they discover that by incorporating human flesh into their product, cats go wild and sales go up. But soon, cats go a bit too wild and start murdering and drinking the blood of their owners. When Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) is attacked, and performs an autopsy on another victim, he starts an investigation into the strange goings-on. Landau (Sanford Mitchell), the big boss at the company, seems to start enjoying the butchery, and employs various heavies to do the dirty deeds. But he finds himself at odds with his co-workers, who disapprove of the murders, and local gravedigger Caleb (Warren Ball), who has yet to be paid for his exploits. One can only go into a film called The Corpse Grinders with a certain level of expectation, that being extremely low. Yet although the film is almost profoundly terrible, it's really not as bad as I expected. Helmed by exploitation hack Ted V. Mikels (director of the also wonderfully titled and fellow Grindhouse Project members Blood Orgy of the She- Devils (1972) and The Doll Squad (1973)), he at least attempts to put some directorial skill into the film, leaving out usual Grindhouse traits such as long, static, and uneventful shots, and scenes of women dancing to repetitive music. The film is pretty well paced, shifting from Glass' investigations to Landau's increasingly murderous schemes to keep things moderately interesting. However, I'm saying this is half-decent for a Grindhouse film. As an actual film, it is admittedly bad. The few scenes depicting the cat attacks are laughable (I mean, how can a cat overpower a human being? Just throw the f****r against a wall!), and the gore predictably ropey. The actual 'corpse grinder' machine looks made of cardboard, and poses so many questions about functionality that I'm not going to get into it. I did laugh out loud at the ridiculous made-up sign language that Landau uses (he just seems to shake his hand a lot), so at least there's some fun to be had. As hard as it is to say it, I'm actually looking forward to seeing more of Mikels' films, as he seems to be in the vein of one of the my guilty pleasures Herschell Gordon Lewis. www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

The best review here so far has been Timothy Farrell's from 2007, that remarked this film as the best-paced and most consistent from director Mikels. But most of the comments, both favorable and unfavorable, have been largely on the money - which in itself tells us we have a rather strange critter here. I.e., how can we say of a film that it is a camp classic in one comment, and that it is not a camp classic in another comment, and yet both comments be right? How can we mock such a film for its cheesiness and then admit that it wallows in that cheesiness, as if cheesiness were among its redeeming values? The answer of course is that Mikels made this film with tongue firmly in cheek. It is simply a mistake to take this film seriously - Mikels is rushing this product through to the drive-in circuit targeting a teen-age audience (hence the lack of nudity or really gory effects), giving them moments allowing them to exclaim "oh, gross!" or "wow, that's weird" while they take a breather from necking in the back-seat. Any attempt at quality or substance would be pointless. So instead, Mikels treats his low-life characters like refugees from a '30s comedy short who drank their brains out and ended up in a Skid Row production of a '40s gangster film as it might have been directed in the '50s by Ed Wood trying to make a '60s kids' film - huh? All right, another way to say this is that Mikels is basically saying, "ok, we have no budget, only two more days to shoot the thing, and our audience won't be paying attention anyway - so let's have fun!" Of course, then, the only issue is, what would Mikels mean by having fun here? But the answer to that is obvious, too. Most exploitation-horror films of the time (especially those coming out of Europe) took themselves way too serious. Even looking back to Ed Wood, one reason that "Plan 9" is so amusing is because Wood clearly thinks he is saying something important with it, even if he's not sure what. There were important exceptions, of course - Corman's "Little Shop" is overt comedy, and "The Undertaker and his Pals," while providing the necessary gore and 'suspense' also throws in large dabs of comic bits and dialog. But "Corpse Grinders" avoids the obvious - there is no overt buffoonery, no sight gags or puns here. Instead Mikels simply pushes a ridiculous plot device - cats eating human meat go crazy, because desperate racketeers can't afford the butcher's bill - as far as it can go, and allows the characters involved to be their low-life selves. Thus we end up with a weird slice of trailer-trash Americana. And that is what produces the humor of the film - small-business economics gone bad, pseudo-science for low-information viewers, and pseudo-religious overtones to provide the hint of some 'moral insight' to the whole affair (made explicit in the trailer for the film, with its blather about "the sacred dead") - which of course isn't really there. Mikels rarely took his exploitation seriously; but in other films of his (esp. "Astro-Zombies") I get the sense he is laughing at his audience, which is unpleasant. That's evident to some extent here as well, but in this case there seems to be a secondary audience targeted - those capable of getting in on the joke. That makes sense in a film made at the end of the '60s camp fad; by the time Mikels made this film, the notion that cat-food could make monsters of little kitties could be recognized by many of the more 'hip' at the drive-in as a humorous excuse, after a few puffs on a doobie, to go back to necking in the back-seat. Ten stars for this bad movie because it is truly one of a kind.

The Corpse Grinders is about as cheap and gritty as you'd expect, which is actually the best thing I can say about it. Even the worst low budget films of this era have that cheesy charm built into the celluloid itself. As best I can figure out, The Corpse Grinders is about people who use human bodies to make cat food and then the cats that eat it turn into bloodthirsty monsters, attacking people at random as two boring scientist-type people try to figure it out. The acting is as awful as you'd imagine, there's no pace to speak of, and at less than 75 minutes, it feels like it's at least an hour too long. Most of the film isn't even enjoyable on a "so bad, it's good" level. Don't waste your time.

Maltby (J. Byron Foster) and Landau (Sanford Mitchell), owners of the Lotus Cat Food factory, obtain their meat from gravedigger Caleb, who sells them recently interred bodies for 20¢/lb. Now, having tasted human flesh, household cats are turning on their owners, the spate of savage attacks leading Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and his nurse Angie (Monika Kelly) to investigate the matter. I've long associated director Ted V. Mikels with the likes of Al Adamson and Andy Milligan: trash auteurs whose low-budget films rarely live up to their lurid titles; because of this, I have avoided his movies -- until now. The Corpse Grinders may very well be the exception in his ouevre, but I actually had a reasonable time with this ghoulish horror which has zero pretensions: it's meant to be nothing more than fun schlock for the drive-in crowd, and in that it succeeds. It might not boast great production values, and its cast are never going to win any awards, but fans of cult movies are bound to find something to enjoy. Given that it centres around people being fed into a meat grinder, the film is surprisingly light on the blood and guts, which might disappoint gore-hounds, but the demented premise is still fun, the performances are spirited, and there are some wonderfully wacky moments guaranteed to raise a smile: try keeping a straight face as the man-eating moggies latch themselves onto their victims' throats, or when Landau and deaf mute Tessie (Drucilla Hoy) use their own special form of sign language to communicate (both randomly flapping their fingers, hoping that the viewer won't notice that they're making it up on the fly). And what self-respecting exploitation film would be complete without some tasty ladies stripping off for the camera? While there's no actual nudity, we do get some 'cheesecake' courtesy of gorgeous brunette Donna (Andy Collings), who strips to her undies to enjoy a beer, whilst Nurse Angie reveals some killer curves when she obligingly slips out of her dress. 5.5/10, generously rounded up to 6 for the effective use of coloured lighting, giving the film a suitably gaudy aesthetic.

It says something about the work of director Ted V. Mikels that I can rate THE CORPSE GRINDERS a 3/10 and yet still describe it as one of his better movies. This cult filmmaker seemed to have a knack of picking interesting-sounding titles for his movies, but whenever you sit down to watch one you find out it's a no-budget mess. At least THE CORPSE GRINDERS has a plot of sorts. It's about a cat food factory run by ruthless businessmen who think nothing of robbing the local graveyard and turning the stolen corpses into cat food. The premise is a nasty one but the execution is quite tame and the gore limited to just a few shots of the mincing machine in operation. The side effect of this unorthodox cat food is that it's given the local moggies a taste for human flesh, so we get a series of repetitive and poorly-staged 'cat attack' scenes in which the vicious felines attack various women reposing in bed or on sofas. Said 'cat attacks' consist of a woman screaming while she grips a struggling cat tight against her chest. These sequences are quite laughable. Elsewhere, we get a few scenes of women in their underwear, and quite a lot of wooden dialogue from the male actors. As a '70s cult movie, it's a crushing disappointment, but then I knew to expect no better from a man I'm quickly discovering to be one of the worst directors ever.

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.

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.

This film is so boring that you will probably want to turn it off half way through, should you be so unfortunate to watch it. Think I'm exaggerating? I wanted to turn it off, but sadly I'm one of those who has to finish a film once I've started watching. The idea behind it actually sounds quite cool - cat food being made out of human bodies, which gives the cats a taste for human flesh. Sadly they didn't do the idea justice and the film turned out to be a bore-fest. There is very little gore, and when the corpses are ground up all we see is them being put into a machine, and a pink pulp coming out of a nozzle. They re-used this scene several times throughout the film to save on budget. Avoid this if you're looking for an entertaining film because you won't find it here. It's not even entertaining enough to pass the time, not even "so bad it's good".