Mountaintop Motel Massacre

JULY 28, 2007

GENRE: CRAP, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Another goddamn slasher. Tomorrow's movie won't be, I swear. I am sort of limited to what I grabbed on my way out the door as I left for Comic Con, but still, I should have been more selective. My apologies, readers who probably didn't notice or care!

Let's move on to the subject at hand, which is: how can a movie with a title like Mountaintop Motel Massacre be so damn boring? And why don’t we ever see the goddamn mountain?

Ripping off films ranging from Psycho to Motel Hell to Funeral Home, and yet never approaching anything as interesting as those films, this one is only (possibly) worth watching solely for the puzzling way in which characters are introduced and killed. For starters, our ‘hero’ shows up some 30 minutes into the film, and is a man who pretends to audition hopeful young singers like our final girl and her cousin in order to nail them. The guy who is ACTUALLY the hero shows up at the beginning and the end, and is never given a name. The kindly young newlyweds who we meet early on are pretty much the first to go. Again, they are ripping off Psycho, so some of this is to be expected, but the problem is it’s never remotely interesting, let alone scary. Kill the whole lot of em for all I care!

For a slasher, they sure don’t follow any of the rules either. The black guy and the sheriff live? The girl who DOESN’T sleep with the record producer guy gets killed*, the slut survives? And the killer is not only a woman, but she doesn’t wear any sort of mask or disguise. Then again, she has no back-story or seeming motive either. Norman was repressed because his mom wouldn’t let him fuck anyone (including her), what the hell is your excuse, Evelyn???

Did you know they had cell phones in 1983??? I sure as hell didn’t. Ordinarily I would chalk it up to anachronistic error, but this was actually MADE in 1983. So either they were real or writer Jim McCullough, Jr. is some sort of Criswell-esque genius. Either way, it belongs to the fake hero, who simultaneously resembles Charles Bronson and a giant bowl of grease.

What say you?

*I should point out that our ‘hero’ tries REALLY HARD to get a 3 way going with a girl and HER COUSIN. Nice.