Microwave Massacre (1983)

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

I love horrible movies. I always wonder, "What's my limit? How bad can it get to make me hate a movie?" The new barometer for bad has been found and it is Microwave Massacre.Donald (Jackie Vernon, a raunchy comedian who was also the voice of Frosty the Snowman, which still kind of blows my mind) works construction by day and has another job by night: dealing with his wife. She keeps cooking gourmet foods that all come out bad and he yearns for the bologna and cheese sandwiches that his co-workers are chowing down on. Then, his wife buys a gigantic microwave, which makes even worse meals.Our hero, such as he is, comes home and loses his temper about all the bad meals and ends up killing his wife. He doesn't remember any of it the next morning as he has a big hangover. He starts cutting up his wife's body and rolling it in foil. Once he accidentally eats some, he learns how delicious she is. And oh yeah, her head is still alive.Soon, he's sharing the meat with his friends and starts killing prostitutes to make more of his secret recipe. Of course, all this cooking leads to a heart attack. And a visit by his wife's sister, who he has to tie up and gag with bread.Of course, all good - or bad, this movie is Troma level bad - things must come to an end. Donald dies of a heart attack, the pacemaker in his chest canceled out by the microwave, which still has May's living head inside.The box art is amazing. That's the nicest thing I can say. Otherwise, it's a painful exercise in puerile humor and poor effects. Watch with caution.

Described by its original DVD distributor as "The Worst Horror Movie of All Time", this 1983 black comedy doesn't quite live up to that promise, but it's a close thing. The painted cover art is fantastic, and typically unrepresentative of the lousy content of the film.Donald (Jackie Vernon) is a depressed, disillusioned construction worker who returns each evening to his frumpy, nagging wife, May (Claire Ginsberg). She feels she doesn't get the gratitude she deserves for "slaving away" at her new microwave all day.One night Donald snaps and murders May. Naturally, the only way he can destroy the evidence is by cooking and eating her. He gets a taste for it (excuse the pun) and thus begins enticing ladies of the night back to his suburban home. He cooks them and feeds them to his insatiable, ignorant co-workers. Donald is free and he's impressing his new best buddies. What can possibly stop his campaign of cannibalism? Vernon was a stand-up with a distinctive deadpan style, which is entirely incongruous with the farcical events of this story. Combined with the film's weirdly languid pace and Leif Horvath's eerie electronic score, it's quite an unsettling experience – although this is mostly due to it being an outright tonal disaster, rather than any controlled sense of atmosphere.With the humour and delivery of a 70s sketch show, it's a movie badly in need of canned laughter, if only to inform us of when we're supposed to laugh. Genuine humour comes in the briefest of snatches: Donald's encounter with Dr Van der Fool (Ed Thomas), who doesn't know which side the heart is on; or the scene where May's sister stops by and Donald has to prop May's disembodied head in the bed to pretend she's still alive ("She looks awful pale...").It's a movie of a mercifully bygone era in which all the women are nags or sluts, although this is par for the course in trash horror of the time. What the flesh sandwich lacks is a juicy layer of satire. Given that the microwave was just becoming a household essential in the 80s, promising the death of the conventional cooker, this has to go down as an opportunity missed – we get none of the consumerist satire of The Stuff, nor the grotesque farce of the more enjoyably outrageous Street Trash.Microwave Massacre just about claws its way into the midnight movie slot through a certain uniqueness and, frankly, its brevity (it comes in at around 75 minutes). But it's more of a freak-out than a fun time.

The 8 is given for those who get a kick out of purposefully raunchy comedy horror satire films. The film was originally filmed in 1981 by a UCLA student as part of a school project but wasn't released until 1983. The purpose of the school project was to write and film an exploitation movie. Well, apparently the guy got an "A" on his project. Microwave Massacre doesn't fail in the cheese department but that is its ultimate charm. It is misogynistic and corny. Poor Donald, the regular guy construction worker is tormented by his shrew wife and her insistence on having "gourmet" microwave meals. Donald is played by comedian Jackie Vernon and the movie is full of classic deadpan one-liners. Plenty of gratuitous nudity and crude, obvious humor. Horrible props and the boom mic is visible in several scenes. If you want a good laugh, give it a whirl. Maybe an hour and twenty minutes long. Awful late disco/early 80s music. For camp horror film fans, it doesn't disappoint.

Is MM a good movie? No. Did I enjoy watching it? Yes.This is one of those films that falls into the "B minus"-movie category. It's sincere in being what it is, but what it is is a lot of schlock.Oddly, Jackie Vernon is probably one of the weakest parts of this film. His portrayal of a middle-aged blue-collar schlub is just not convincing. (Hmmm...as if any of the other actors are convincing.) I/m sure that this film probably wouldn't have been made at all if he hadn't been attached to the project, but he's just not very good/interesting/funny in his role.On the bright side, the producers somehow managed to scrape together quite a few pretty good-looking women and get them to take their tops of. In fact, I'm rather surprised that Marla Simons didn't go on to do more films after this one, even if this would have been due to her assets rather than her acting. The nudity in this film is silly rather than titillating and I personally would have given it a PG-13 rating.Everybody else in the film acts as if they're in a sketch on the Carol Burnett Show, mugging and over-reacting. Some of the jokes and one-liners are pretty funny, just don't expect any real acting. Oh, yeah...and it's not at all scary or even gross.The only big question that I had after watching this was, "How did the huge, industrial microwave fit into that little shipping box that you see in the beginning of the movie?" Recommended for people who are tired of artsy-fartsy horror films.