Yes, I’ve done this one before. Yes, I’m doing it again. The stars just seemed right. I turned 25 a week ago, this was the first movie we ever did back at the old Brotherhood of Bad Movies site, and Malorie got me the DVD for my birthday. I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate a quarter-century than with Jackie “Voice of Frosty the Snowman” Vernon, and the good ol’ X1-74A.
I won’t go in-depth into the plot here, as the old review was almost nothing but a plot run-down (as were most all of the BBM reviews – we’ve come a long way). For those who forgot or haven’t seen it, here’s a quick overview. Donald is a construction worker whose wife, May, is constantly trying to feed him fancy food when all he wants is bologna sandwiches. One night, in a fit of drunken rage, he kills her and cooks her in their new microwave. After munching on her hand as a midnight snack, he develops a taste for human flesh and starts killing random women to fill his lunch pail for work. Eventually, his constant proximity to heavy doses of microwave radiation causes his pacemaker to misfire and kill him. The evil eyes of May’s severed head, still sitting on a workbench in the garage, begin to glow, implying a sort of “Twilight Zone”-style twist that it was her ghost taking revenge on him for the murder.
Orson Welles once said that, “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations”. Similarly, Ross Hagen once said that the worst thing you can do to an independent movie is give it too much money. It seems that when a production has too much scratch in the coffers, it becomes about how good you can make the movie look, and not how good you can make the movie. We have here a perfect example of that. I don’t think there was every any risk of a movie called Microwave Massacre getting major studio backing. Movies like this are labors of love.
I’ve previously expressed my respect for independent b-movie filmmakers of decades past. Before digital video made things like Brain Damage Films (ugh) possible, and every Larry, Curly, and Schmuck was suddenly able to make a movie in their backyard over a weekend and release it on cheapo DVD, you had to be pretty goddamn serious about your schlock. You had to round up a crew, cast, money, locations, and lug a full compliment of heavy-ass cameras, film, and other equipment around trying to do with a few thousand bucks and a week the same thing the big boys did with a few million bucks and a year or so. There was no home video market (or, in this case, it was in its infancy and there was a whole new game on), so Al Adamson was competing for living space in the same market as William Friedkin.
So what do you do when you don’t have any money to make a movie that looks like it was made for more than a month’s grocery budget? Fall back on craftsmanship, that’s what. You pull out all the stops and you abso-fuckin’-lutely pack your movie to the rafters with every brilliant joke and genius bit of slapstick you can think of, that’s what. Big-budget movies always have overlong runtimes and wasted scenes that should have wound up on the cutting room floor. Then we have Microwave Massacre, with a 76-minute runtime and not one second wasted. This and Psychos In Love are two of my favorite movies, and probably two of the most unknown and underappreciated movies out there. Once again, what seems like a cheap throwaway bit of crap on first look, becomes an almost mathematically precise ballet of gag after gag, designed to keep the audience rolling on the floor without ever giving them a chance to breathe, or for the action to lose its pace. The more viewings you sit through, jokes start appearing that you didn’t notice the first time because they’re quiet and subtle, and you were laughing so hard at the broader stuff that you missed them. These bits are the mortar between the stones, if you will, designed to help the movie hold up to repeated viewings in a sort of time-release capsule of awesome that will make you spit coffee out your nose at work the next morning.
While watching this again the other night, Bob, Fistula and I were discussing the simple dramatic breakdowns we were taught in high school, rising action, climax, denouement, etc. While trying to decide how to plot this particular movie, we realized it was all money shot. Sure, there’s a linear plot to follow, but the movie starts high, never sags in the second or third reel, and keeps the laughs rolling until the very last credit. This movie is 76 minutes of climax, folks. It doesn’t get any better.
This movie made its Brotherhood/Tomb debut at the height of movie nights back in the glory days when none of us had real jobs or any responsibilities aside from which junk food to eat while spending an entire weekend pounding flick after flick. It was one of the first times we had strayed from the beaten path of more obvious horror/sci-fi fare. Needless to say it was a watershed moment in the lives of several young cinemasochists. We had no idea you were even allowed to make movies like this. Sure, cannibals hacking some dude’s wang off and eating it to gross out an audience is one thing, but to be able to pull off a comic tour de force of Stooges proportions with essentially the same subject matter, but all the while winking at the camera so hard that the danger of pulling your entire forehead muscle becomes a very real possibility, and yet never making it so nudge-nudge wink-wink that it becomes tiresome and overwrought? That, my friends, is a glory to behold, and a gem to be treasured for generations of cinemasochists the world over.
Would serious film critics put me in stocks and throw hatchets at me for comparing stuff like this to the Stooges and the Marx Brothers? Sure. Would a serious film critic have the first fucking clue how to loosen his sphincter and actually understand how to have a good time and be entertained by a movie without overanalyzing the composition of every single goddamn frame of the flick? I doubt it.
This movie is a love letter to each and every one of us. Some may not appreciate the love. Some may think it seems like the love that your weird uncle Ernie, who smells like Werther’s candies and cheap whiskey and stale tobacco breath, wants to give you at all those family functions, and not really a very desirable kind of love at all. Not so, brothers and sisters. This is the purest love of all. The kind of cosmic love that gives you an all-embracing hug that makes the troubles of life melt away. The kind of love that says, “Hey, the Universe allowed the proper alignments for this movie to be made just for you. The Universe just wants you to know that everything’s groovy and that you should relax and have a beer and not take it all so seriously.” The Universe just happened to choose Jackie Vernon as its avatar, and a bunch of topless women being eaten as its cryptogram. But is that so bad? Not if you know how to decipher it.
When you sit down and watch this movie, don’t take it at its face value. Let it wash over you, and don’t be so damn determined to have a good time that you fool yourself out of having one. Trust me, the movie will do all the work. Watching Microwave Massacre with an open mind and a healthy dose of childlike wonder is like having the girl on top. It’s much more fun, you have a clearer view of everything, and at the end, you feel like it was all about you. And it is. Microwave Massacre loves you. Isn’t it about time you loved it back?
The Moral of the Story: Let down your hair, unbutton your blouse, hike up your skirt, stick out your tongue…AND A COKE!
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
Check out Ragnarok's original review for Microwave Massacre
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