Motel Hell (1980)

 

Farmer Vincent Smith and his younger sister Ida live on a farm with an attached motel, named "Motel Hello". The Smith family farm is renowned for its smoked meats, but since this is a comedy-horror film, the secret ingredient is the old Soylent Green scenario: people.

Vincent employs a variety of tactics to collect victims. The most direct is to engineer accidents on the nearby road, such as by shooting out the front tyre of a motorcycle. But that's far from his only technique. However he initially acquires in his prey, however, Vincent has the same fare for them all. He sedates them, cuts their vocal cords to prevent them from screaming, and buries them up to their necks in his "secret garden".

Or at least, that's how it goes until beautiful young woman Terry falls into his hands. Old Vincent - and he is old, being more than thirty years Terry's senior - is instantly smitten. He tells Terry that her former lover, Bo, was killed in their crash, though of course, Bo is actually in the secret garden.

Terry's beauty also catches the eye of the local sheriff, the genial if rather inept Bruce. Bruce also happens to be Vincent's younger brother, and is bitterly disappointed when Terry returns the older man's affections, rather than his own.

Of course, it remains to be seen what Terry will think of Vincent once she learns the secret behind his famous smoked meats ...

So as noted earlier, what we have here is a comedy-horror.  Such films often struggle to develop much in the way of tension of scares.  Scream and The Faculty are among the few exceptions that come to mind. Motel Hell will certainly not be joining them among those outliers: it's very much canted toward goofy schlock and off-colour jokes.

So how well does it work as a comedy?  Well, it is very broad and absurd in its comedic style, and I think it is at its best when the goofiness is not overly called out.  For instance, the time Vincent uses cardboard cut-out cows for one of his traps. When the script more loudly sign-posts its jokes, in a nudge nudge wink wink kind of fashion. they tend to fall a bit flat.

I did like the general geniality of the murderous cannibals, and their hippy trippy motives and methods. Their self-justification is obviously spurious, but at least they're a change from the usual squalid, mentally deficient thugs of more straight-forward cannibal horror fare.

The movie definitely has some issues with its depiction of romance and gender, though.  The burgeoning relationship between Terry and Vincent is very under-developed, and no mention is made of the fact that he is more than 30 years older than her. Her quickly forgotten previous boyfriend Bo was also played by an actor 20 years older than her.

Still, May-December romances do happen.  A bigger issue is that the film ultimately casts Sheriff Bruce, who is pretty much an out-and-out sex pest, in a heroic role.  I'm not keen on that.  Not keen at all.

I also felt that the film's final act stretched out too long, with an excess of fairly clumsily staged action sequences that failed to be either exciting or amusing - and they really needed to be one or the other.

Motel Hell had a few amusing moments, but it was not good enough that I can really give it even a qualified recommendation.