Rating: 2.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2024 | 16/52 | Karen Black
A shotgun blows a tire out on a passing car. Bruno’s black boots step out of the car and scream at the tire. He goes to the boot to get a spare, but there isn’t one.
Bruno hitches with a minister. He tries to take the minister’s car at gunpoint but shoots him and crashes the car instead.
So, Bruno takes the minister’s clerical collar and hitches a ride from Magnolia. He pulls the same routine with the gun, but Magnolia complies. When Bruno isn’t looking, Magnolia stabs him in the head with a hair bodkin, stuffs him in a body bag, and reapplies her lipstick before taking him to a remote villa.
Auntie Lee (Karen Black) greets her, angry about Magnolia’s run hoses and bruised face, but softens when she learns Bruno is 250 lbs. Larry (Michael Berryman) takes Bruno’s body to the barn.
So goes the routine for Auntie Lee’s hired women — find a man, bring him back to the villa any way they can so Larry can process them. For what? Why, Auntie Lee’s famous Meat Pies.
But when the girls accidentally take a guy with an important New York father, a private investigator questions everyone.
The movie feels like the missing link between Texas Chainsaw Massacre II and House of 1000 Corpses. This movie retains the campy cannibalism of Texas Chainsaw and brings Karen Black’s signature oddball charisma that has made her a horror movie favorite.
It’s not a great movie, and it’s honestly not that fun for the first hour, but it gets sufficiently weird and goofy to get me through
** Stray Thoughts / Spoilers **
- Stretched skin artwork
- Decapitation pantry
- Every door whooshes so ominously
- “I’m not the kind of guy you wanna push around — I’m from New York.”
- A lot of yelling at tires in this movie. Michael Berryman has an extended sequence of yelling at a spare tire.
- The Baby character amps up the weird
- “🎵Men are superior. Women are inferior. Come on, baby, I ain’t no square. Look at me, I got really long hair.”
- Blacklight Stonehenge bedroom
- “Sweet death, the final act of eroticism.”
- Poor Pat Morita :(