Microwave Massacre Dual Format Blu-ray + DVD

Product Information

Given a limited theatrical release in July of 1987, Blood Diner has managed to garner a minor cult following on VHS over the years. Thankfully, this one hasn’t been relegated to utter obscurity and can be seen with relative ease – Lionsgate gave the film a lovingly restored Blu-ray release in 2016. Every self-discerning fan of trashy cinema should have it on their shelf.

Everybody else in the film acts as if they're in a sketch on the Carol Burnett Show, mugging and over-reacting. Some of the jokes and one-liners are pretty funny, just don't expect any real acting. Oh, yeah...and it's not at all scary or even gross. And yet in the passing years the movie has garnered a cult following among fans of bad movies. Those who revel in the worst film has to offer have found a gem to add to their collections. Seriously, the movie is terrible for so many reasons and yet it's the sort of movie that you feel compelled to watch from start to finish. It's not one of those intentionally bad movies, it is one where those making it really thought they had something but the end result could not have been what they intended. As is nearly always true for Arrow products, video production is top notch and sound quality far transcends what the film would have had in 1983. Arrow doesn't just do thinks in a cheap way - they take these films and they make them better. Consistently. These are the extras included this time around: Four years passed before Mr. Turner re-emerged with The Howling: New Moon Rising, and he entered with both guns blazing. In addition to taking the lead role, Clive wrote, directed, produced, and edited the seventh entry. Rarely have you seen these tasks performed so poorly.Had this movie been entertaining I would have given it a higher score. I don't do the 'so-bad-it's-good'-thing. If a movie is "bad", but still entertains me, I think it's good. But this crappy s**t is not entertaining. It's a total fail. MICROWAVE MASSACRE is a film that I truly, truly hated the first time I watched it. The question would be why I bothered giving it a second chance but there's no question that it played out much better this time because it's smart to go into it not expecting too much and certainly not expecting some sort of graphic horror movie. The second and third Howling pictures are supremely strange and emphasize, even exaggerate the darkly comedic aspects of Dante’s work, something John Hough hoped to reverse when he stepped in to direct the fourth installment, The Original Nightmare. It is here, in 1988 during the pre-production of Howling IV, that the mysterious Clive Turner entered the picture. On the bright side, the producers somehow managed to scrape together quite a few pretty good-looking women and get them to take their tops of. In fact, I'm rather surprised that Marla Simons didn't go on to do more films after this one, even if this would have been due to her assets rather than her acting. The nudity in this film is silly rather than titillating and I personally would have given it a PG-13 rating. Arrow Video’s Blu-ray + DVD of Microwave Massacre is an eye-opener in that it surely looks a thousand times better than its original VHS release in old clamshell cases. The show was filmed in 35mm with proper lighting, and although the lighting is just so-so, a 2K scan from the original elements makes it look fairly amazing. Forget the misinformed IMDB ‘goof’ reports of boom mikes and unwanted hands poking into the frame; those are all matted away when the image is properly framed in widescreen. As unlikely as it may sound, the show looks great in HD.

The late, great Vernon appears very “out of it” for the duration (he’s almost certainly drunk). There are segments where he barely seems to know what’s going on, and his speech is constantly slurred. So many flubbed lines made it into Microwave Massacre that it has to set some kind of record (“I don’t remember leaving a wake-up hangover”…?). Art direction was provided by Robert A. Burns, a flat-out genius who built all the props used in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; his color palette here is bright, garish.

Made in Hollywood, USA

Kong displays no sense of restraint or subtlety, no hesitance to go all out. Her picture is frequently quite funny, too: unlike countless horror-comedies, a large number of gags in Blood Diner earn genuine laughter.

Picture in your mind how the actor who did the voice of Frosty the Snowman might have looked. Now imagine that guy having dry-hump sex with random hookers ('Frosty' grunts and groans included), killing and dismembering them, and then cooking them up in the world's most ridiculously huge microwave oven. Or, you can skip that mental exercise and rent this film.Listed as a producer, Turner’s exact duties on Howling IV remain unclear (like virtually everything in the man’s life). Hough was convinced that Turner regularly faxed script re-writes to the set under the pseudonym Freddie Rowe. The first installment to go straight-to-video, IV was easily the worst in the series to date, yet it failed to derail the Howling train. This is a… special film; a mentally handicapped approximation of a slasher. It’s the kind of movie you would see during weekend runs to the local mom & pop video store and think, “Damn, that big box art looks sweet and with a title like that it has to be gold!” And, really, if you watched this at any age under 17 it probably was. I will say there are bad movies that are just horrid through and through; Microwave Massacre at the very least has the luxury of being awfully entertaining in an oddly endearing sort of way.