Alright, fellow tapeheads, dim the lights, maybe crack open a Tab cola (if you can find one!), and let’s talk about a film that feels less like a movie and more like a dare someone whispered across the counter at a slightly sticky video rental store back in the day. I'm talking about the one, the only, the utterly bizarre Microwave Massacre from 1983. This isn't just a title; it's a mission statement, a glorious piece of Z-grade lunacy that could only have bubbled up from the primordial ooze of early 80s exploitation cinema.
### From Frosty to Frenzy
Forget sophisticated horror or complex characters. The premise is elegantly simple, in the way a sledgehammer is elegant: Donald (played, incredibly, by comedian Jackie Vernon) is a perpetually put-upon construction worker whose wife, May (played with shrill gusto by Claire Ginsberg), has embraced gourmet cooking with terrifying enthusiasm. Her culinary experiments are… challenging. Fed up with foie gras and crab claws for breakfast, Donald finally snaps. One booze-fueled argument later, May ends up deceased, and Donald, facing a disposal problem, gets a bright, terrible idea involving his new, absurdly oversized industrial microwave oven. Yes, folks. He cooks her. And discovers he likes it.
The sheer cognitive dissonance of seeing Jackie Vernon, the famously deadpan stand-up comedian and the voice of Frosty the Snowman, playing a cannibalistic killer is half the fun. Vernon delivers his lines with the same lugubrious, hangdog expression he used for his comedy routines, making the horrifying acts somehow even more surreal and darkly funny. His monotone "Oh dear" after committing murder is comedic gold delivered straight from the abyss. It's a performance so tonally weird it almost feels like outsider art. Apparently, Vernon took the role partly because he was struggling financially, a common tale for performers finding niche work in the low-budget trenches of the era.
### A Recipe for Disaster (And Cult Status)
Let's be clear: Microwave Massacre is cheap. Really cheap. Reportedly filmed way back in 1979 for somewhere around $60,000-$75,000 (roughly $250k-$315k today – still peanuts for a feature!), it sat on a shelf for four years before Wayne Berwick (son of low-budget maestro Irvin Berwick, director of The Monster of Piedras Blancas) finally saw it released in '83. And boy, does that low budget show. The lighting is often flat, the sets look like they were borrowed from a community theater, and the editing sometimes feels like it was done with a pair of safety scissors.
But honestly? That’s part of the charm! This isn't slick Hollywood product; it feels like something cobbled together with spit, grit, and maybe some questionable leftovers. Remember those wonderfully unconvincing gore effects from the era? Microwave Massacre delivers, sort of. The dismembered body parts often look suspiciously like props from a butcher shop display window, drenched in brightly colored paint-blood. It’s not realistic, not by a long shot, but it has that handmade, tactile quality that CGI often lacks. There’s a certain grimy sincerity to its attempts at shock value. And that microwave! It’s practically a character itself – a gleaming, metallic beast that dominates Donald’s kitchen, humming with malevolent potential.
### Midnight Snack or Cinematic Indigestion?
The film lurches between trying to be a shocking horror flick and a pitch-black comedy, never quite mastering either but creating something uniquely strange in the process. Donald starts sharing his "special" lunch meat with his construction buddies (Loren Schein and Al Troupe add to the blue-collar grit), leading to some truly tasteless gags. The script, credited to Craig Muckler and Thomas Singer, throws everything at the wall – misogyny, cannibalism jokes, slapstick – hoping some of it sticks. Does it work? Not in any conventional sense. But is it memorable? Absolutely.
Finding this gem on VHS back in the day felt like unearthing forbidden knowledge. It wasn't something you'd see advertised on TV; it was a discovery made scanning the horror shelves, lured in by that audacious title and maybe some lurid cover art. Watching it on a fuzzy CRT, the picture occasionally rolling, almost enhanced the sleazy, dreamlike quality. You felt like you were getting away with something, watching this bizarre artifact smuggled out of filmmaking's uncanny valley. It was largely ignored upon release, maybe picking up a few scathing reviews, but the home video boom gave it eternal life amongst connoisseurs of cinematic weirdness.
Rating: 3/10
Okay, look, on any objective scale of filmmaking quality, this movie is scraping the bottom of the barrel. The acting (outside Vernon's bizarre commitment) is wooden, the direction rudimentary, and the script is a mess of bad taste. BUT, and this is a crucial but for VHS Heaven dwellers, the rating doesn't capture its value as a cult object. It earns this low score through its technical ineptitude and questionable content, yet its sheer audacity, Jackie Vernon's inexplicable presence, and its status as a time capsule of ultra-low-budget 80s exploitation give it a weird, compelling energy.
Final Thought: Microwave Massacre is the cinematic equivalent of finding a moldy, half-eaten sandwich in the back of the fridge – you probably shouldn't consume it, but morbid curiosity compels you to poke at it anyway. A must-see for bad movie aficionados, but maybe keep the Pepto-Bismol handy.