Directed by T.L.P. Swicegood—he also wrote Escape from Hell Island, and his name sounds like a lawyer you’d consult when you have a workers’ comp case — this 60-minute oddity opens with three guys in motorcycle helmets picking a name out of a phone book, heading over to a woman’s apartment, carving off her legs and bringing the dismembered limbs back to their restaurant. Turns out that one of these men is an undertaker, Mr. Mort (Ray Dannis), who has cooked up a sweet cannibalistic scam with two diner owners, Spike and Doc. They chop up unsuspecting locals, serve them as punny daily specials and then Mort turns around and jacks up the funeral costs on the grieving families. It’s a closed-loop economy!
Enter P.I. Harry Glass (James Westmoreland, credited here as Rad Fulton), who loses his secretary/girlfriend to these helmet-wearing weirdos. He vows revenge, but honestly, he spends most of the movie getting completely outmaneuvered by cheap script tricks and terrible puns. Warrene Ott shows up as the secretary, only to get turned into a hamburger special—then shows up again as her own twin sister, Thursday! You have to respect a budget low enough that recycling your lead actress as a twin is the most efficient way to keep the runtime ticking past an hour.
This movie has vats of bubbling acid, fog machines, delivery guys taking meat cleavers to the head, motorcycle chases ending in semi-truck head-ons and Robert Lowery, who once played Batman, wandering around like he’s wondering how his career hit this low. The gore looks about as realistic as a rubber Halloween prop dipped in ketchup. And it fits perfectly into the triple feature Ted V. Mikels created, alongside The Corpse Grinders and The Embalmer. It was once around 80 minutes, but Mikels cut most of the gore scenes and a sequence with Ray Dannis in drag as an old lady.
Police in Louisville, Kentucky, confiscated a print of the film based on a local law that banned “the publication of materials dealing with bloodshed, lust or crime.” And in Clarksville, Indiana, the Parents-Teachers Association and several women’s groups got theaters to cancel this film.
You can watch this on YouTube.
