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[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/27/2020: THE CURSE OF CATTOBER pt 3 - THE CORPSE GRINDERS

Ted V. Mikel's notorious sickie THE CORPSE GRINDERS is one of a few movies that has become symbolic of my whole journey with psychotronic cinema. Today, I would understand exactly what kind of movie this is, even if I had not seen this exact item: An exploitation movie in the truest sense, just as infamous for its grossout premise as it is for its extraordinary cheapness, delivering all of the moral turpitude and almost none of the over the top effects promised by its attention-grabbing key art--or its dumbfounding title. But when I was a kid, I seriously wondered about these films; worried about them, even.

I wasn't allowed to watch anything that smacked of bad taste, but I still managed to build up a vivid awareness that there were movies out there about forms of perversion and evil that I could never imagine, made by freaks of the highest order. I would hunch nervously over the horror rack at our local mom & pop video mart, earning me the nickname Igor from the amused heshers behind the register, while my parents went through the motions of renting me LABYRINTH for a eight zillionth time. I was allowed to buy exactly one copy of Fangoria (the December 1990 issue featuring LEATHERFACE) before my mother reneged on this gesture of tolerance, but I was allowed to read most anything I wanted--my intellectual hippie folks wouldn't dream of censuring the written word--and I spent many hours, nay years, poring over the Re/Search book of Incredibly Strange Films. This helped create a kind of cinema of the mind for me, in which I tried my best to realize what the movies discussed in the book could possibly be like in real life. The book's detailed descriptions of pictures like SPIDER BABY, THE WIZARD OF GORE, SHE-FREAK, THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS, etc  were stimulating in some ways, and only added to my confusion in others. Without seeing them up close, it was hard to make sense of their combination of laughable cheapness, unfunny comedy, and genuinely sickening crimes against human dignity. What these movies are like, is something you can only find out for yourself.

Having said all that, I'm still going to try to tell you what THE CORPSE GRINDERS is like. We open on the rainswept grounds of the Farewell Acres cemetery, where a jerky-addicted ogre called Caleb (Warren Ball) is extracting freshly interred bodies from the earth, as a gaggle of geese honk savagely from being a wire fence. Caleb's dotty wife Cleo (Ann Noble) argues with Caleb for not-the-last time about how his jerky habit is going to ruin his appetite for the dinner she slops out for her filthy baby doll instead, while Caleb bitches about not being paid by a Mr. Landau for his latest job. What's the job, you ask? Selling corpses to the Lotus Cat Food company, where Landau (Sanford Mitchell) has discovered that human flesh is the secret to his success, having kinda-accidentally fed a difficult shareholder into his cat food grinder. It's hard to say exactly how this has led to such a windfall for Landau, especially since he has to produce the illicit pet food one corpse at a time with his neurotic assistant Maltby (J. Byron Foster, my favorite guy in the movie). I guess I've just never dealt with a cat whose specific addiction is so obvious, so oppressive, even, that it forces me to buy the most expensive cat food on the market. This is what is happening to customers whose cats have fallen under the spell of Lotus, and they pay for it with their very lives because Lotus has given their pets a taste for long pig. Landau struggles to find more sources for his secret ingredient, including a mob hitman, giggly morticians who load the bodies up with "pork-flavored fluid (instead of) formaldehyde", and his own employees--"The world is full of ingredients!" he declares, hopefully. Meanwhile, Doctors Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) decide to investigate the recent rash of cat attacks; it's hard to imagine how they're going to get to the bottom of anything, amid many makeout breaks and random changes of clothes, but somebody has to stop all these house cats from devouring the rest of Los Angeles, and it might as well be them.

So that's the plot, but THE CORPSE GRINDERS is still a lot weirder than what I've described. You could be forgiven for wondering whether the movie is supposed to take place in Andy Milligan's version of 19th century London, with Cleo's bizarre insistence on a cockney accent, and Caleb's grumbling about finances involving "pounds" (actually pounds of flesh) in their ramshackle dwelling on the edge of a cardboard-and-styrofoam cemetery. A further Dickensian touch is provided by Landau's one-legged deaf-mute assistant Tessie (Drucilla Hoy), who limps around glumly in a sailor dress and Little Orphan Annie fright wig. If she could talk, she would probably sound like the widow Babcock (Zena Foster), whose husband was the first to go into the grinder, and who speaks in a twittering falsetto that would sound more natural coming out of a sock puppet. All of these community theater touches contrast jarringly with the movie's exploitation nature, which revels in scenes of hardboiled scumbags shaking each other down, of women taking their clothes off for literally no reason at all, and in the suggestion that the gloopy pink paste extruding out of the cat food grinder was once a beautiful girl or a rotting cadaver. The grinder itself is a sight to behold, reminding me at once of something from SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, and the Wish Squisher invention from the MST3K episode of SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. The metallic gizmos whirring along its façade glint in the fabulous gelled lights over the production line, optimistically evoking the rich purples and greens of a Mario Bava picture; in a movie that's explicitly about money woes, in a subgenre that's specifically known for its cheapness, it's nice that director Mikels shelled out to add a little extra style to the grinding scenes.

And on that note, I would like to propose, without having much to say about it yet, that some exploitation films are allegories for exploitation filmmaking itself. I don't include all genre movies about money in this category: it's easy to identify many thrillers as being about more general economic conditions that affect us all, including a lot of noir entries. But then there are movies like THE CORPSE GRINDERS, or LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, or COLOR ME BLOOD RED (or its predecessor A BUCKET OF BLOOD), in which the main character tries to solve his financial woes by committing an utterly dehumanizing crime. In these three examples, there is the revelation that honest work doesn't pay, and that money is only gained through the individual's willingness to exploit sensational imagery and/or decadent sensations to tease, titillate, and even addict the customer. It's hard not to see Landau, Seymour, and Adam Sorg as avatars for Ted Mikels, Roger Corman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, in their similar quests to prey on the craven appetites of the public, at a minimum cost for a maximum payout. If you have other movies you'd like to add to my list, please feel free to reach out.

 All told, it's hard not to like THE CORPSE GRINDERS for its sheer audacity--first, in selling something so meager as a "real movie", and second, for making the movie be about THIS. Also, all of this is significantly enriched when you know a little something about Mikels, a polyamorous eccentric who lived in a castle, whose grounds--and guard geese!--were used for the scenes in Farewell Acres. I'm not even going to try to discuss his prolific exploitation career and personal exploits, because that would be better handled by a longform piece on him specifically. It seems like a few documentaries have attempted the subject, but I don't know whether they're any good. It would be nice if Frank Hennenlotter would give it a try, or someone similarly capable, if there even is such a person. In the meantime, I will contribute the sole piece of information that my own scant research has turned up in preparing for this Blogtober entry: That THE CORPSE GRINDERS was co-written by Arch Hall Sr, and Joe Cranston--father of the now-iconic Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. I don't know if I'd call that a reason to see the movie, but luckily there are plenty of other reasons to check out THE CORPSE GRINDERS this Halloween. If you don't, then you can never really know what the hell I'm talking about.

#blogtober #2020 #the corpse grinders #ted v mikels #horror #exploitation #cattober #arch hall sr #joe cranston #sean kenney #monika kelly #sanford mitchell #j byron foster #warren ball #ann noble