October is about 1 week away, and it’s around this time that I start watching a lot of horror movies (though I usually watch them all year round anyway). I always try to catch old, obscure, lesser known flicks I’ve never heard of or seen, and a bunch of them are available on YouTube, so tonight I watched a double feature. First up was 1979’s The Meateater.
This movie was hilariously bad. It begins with a frustrated shoe salesman who gets an offer on an old movie theatre he wants to buy. His wife is hesitant, but since it’s always been his dream to run his own cinema, she agrees, and so they pack their 2 kids and move to open and operate the theatre.
They get it up and running, but there ends up being a mysterious person who wants to sabotage it, and sets about to terrorize them and ruin their opening night. I’m not sure why the movie is titled The Meateater, other than an early scene that shows someone eating a rat. Then again, the dialogue is filled with a bunch of random, bizarre references to meat, including roast beef, Jimmy Dean sausage, and a few ridiculous lines where the wife makes it a point to list off the nutritional ingredients of hot dogs. It’s due to cheesy touches like this that make the film so much fun, in between the funny murders and shenanigans, which include an electrocution, a rotting corpse, and a crude detective that offends everyone with his no filter talk. I enjoyed The Meateater, a goofy oddity that had me laughing its entire runtime.
As for the 2nd film I watched, Death Screams, it was a tedious bore.
Made in 1982, it’s your basic, run-of-the-mill slasher. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it’s not very memorable. A group of teens are terrorized by a machete wielding psychopath. The story drags along, spending too much time on the characters hanging out at a carnival and generally goofing off. It’s not until they meet up at the lake and then cemetery later at night that the murderous fun begins, though by then you may be bored to death by all the dullness that comes before.
Since none of the characters are very interesting or likeable, you enjoy when they start getting picked off. It’s just too bad that it takes so long to get there. There are a few early killings, but they’re not enough to keep you engaged. Though one scene is so bizarre it’s laughable, where some girl gets shot in the back with an arrow, then stumbles onto a carousel and sits on a horse, before the killer turns it on and suffocates her with a bag over her head. The killings at the end are decent, including a decapitation, throat slashings, someone falling into an open grave and having their hands cut off, and a head being blown to pieces. It’s too bad you have to wait until the last few minutes for most of that.
Death Screams is mostly forgettable, save for the few bits of carnage at the end, not to mention the ridiculous out of place music that blares during the climax. If you’re an 80’s slasher completist you might want to see it, otherwise, feel free to skip it, as you won’t miss much.
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