Hey, sometimes I’m a sucker for a catchy title and an alarming poster.
Microwave Massacre from 1979 stars comedian Jackie
Vernon (best known to people around my age and older as the voice of Frosty the
Snowman from the Rankin/Bass specials) as a disgruntled construction worker who
comes home one evening and in a drunken rage murders his shrew, nagging wife.
When he wakes up the next morning, he has no memory of what occurred at nighttime,
but to his horror discovers her corpse stuffed inside of their new, absurdly
large microwave oven. After his initial shock wears off, he dismembers her body
and stores it in foil wrap in the refrigerator. Not too long after that, he
unintentionally takes some bites of his ex-wife’s hand, and yet again, his disgust
subsides when he realizes that he quite likes the taste. Maybe there are even
tastier morsels out there?
So, make no mistake about it; this is a remarkably trashy
joint. When your movie opens by focusing on several closeups of a buxom woman
walking down the street for no reason whatsoever, you know what you’ve signed up
for. The movie’s whole style just screams “just go with it.” A lot of its humor
falls flat, with there being a bit too much reliance on Vernon’s character just
kind of talking to no one in particular (reportedly Rodney Dangerfield was
considered for this role, but his asking price was too high). And despite its
title, there really isn’t much in the way of, well, massacring. There’s a
decent body count and some gross moments involving Vernon’s character sharing
pieces of his “lunch” with co-workers, but the movie’s poster(s) gives the
audience hope for something that just doesn’t quite come to fruition. All that
being said, I was never bored during Microwave Massacre, and I found it
to be a lot of fun. It’s a weirdly charming low budget oddity that could’ve been
better in more capable hands, but it’s a short watch and not a terrible way to
kill some time. I wouldn’t be upset if a remake was greenlit.
With all due respect to Microwave Massacre, I think
they lost in the contest of “most eye-catching title and poster” here. I first
became aware of the alarmingly titled Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator at
the annual Monster Mania convention held in Maryland, but for reasons I can’t
quite recall I decided against buying a bootleg DVD of it. But now that I’m
essentially a homebody who is mostly done with the “con” stuff, there’s no
reason to continue waiting on this one. Plus, it’s distributed by the kings of
trash Troma Entertainment. How can you go wrong? I mean guys, that poster is
pretty out there.
Well, you can go wrong rather quickly when you remember one
very simple fact: being distributed by Troma does not mean it was MADE by Troma.
So, this movie is a lie. Calling it a horror film (much less a horror-comedy as
it is usually tagged) is stretching it. There was more money spent on crafting
its poster than there was on concocting a coherent and halfway decent picture.
There are no incinerations and technically no deaths. If anything, I’d classify
it as a cheap, boring, meta-thriller masquerading as a horror movie. It’s another
“bored rich people want to do bad things to pass the time” type of project which
we’ve already seen before. There are two or three major twists that take place
during its running time that serve more to annoy the audience than to shock them.
Its actual ending makes you wonder why in the world you just spent ninety
minutes of your life left on this miserable planet watching something that
basically trolled you. It’s akin to taking the Rorschach test only for them to
just tell you that you’ve been literally staring at a picture of a circle the
entire time and that the psychologists are just actors for hire. Worst of all
is that it is criminally dull. I legitimately fast forwarded three or four
times hoping that this flick would give me SOMETHING to be excited about, but
it never happened. And the only time I stop any movie is when I need to use the
bathroom or check on dinner.
This was legitimately one of the worst movies I’ve ever watched
since I started doing this in 2011. I think Children of the Corn and FeatdotCom
may have lost the title of “worst of 2024” for this year’s marathon. At least
with Corn, you knew what you were getting, and they didn’t really lie to
the audience. This though? Junk. Add it to the list of “great posters for
terrible pictures” alongside stuff like The Bees, The Phantom Menace and
Reptilicus.
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