Week of Review - Motel Hell

Welcome back to Week of Review, where I dedicate 5 to 8 days to reviewing material that’s adjacent to something topical and relevant.  This week I’m looking at 5 hotel horror flicks all leading up to American Horror Story’s 5^th season: Hotel.  Yesterday I looked at the underappreciated Stephen King adaptation 1408, this week I look at the bizarre alleged horror-comedy and staple of late night horror showings and B-movie marathons everywhere Motel Hell. 

Released in 1980 as a supposed satire of modern horror films like Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Motel Hell is an odd, uncomfortable little curiosity that I’m honestly not sure why so many people seem to genuinely remember.  Though the ranks of “horror classics” have been thoroughly obfuscated with the rise of the Internet this is a movie I remember being regarded as a “classic horror B-movie” from back in the ‘90s.  I first encountered the film when my dad mentioned it off hand as something he saw one late night in New Mexico in between El Santo movies.  That in particular slice of weirdness is exactly where Motel Hell was always meant to live if we’re being honest, this is a movie that was aimed fairly aggressively at the late night TV circuit, and it shows. 

The plot, such as it is, revolves around Farmer Vincent Smith, played by Rory Calhoun.  For the star of a low budget, backwoods horror film that involves cannibalism Farm Vincent is a surprisingly shrewd businessman and probably the best thing about the film.  He’s set himself up with a motel just off the road of a major highway and managed to turn his famous smoked meats into a fairly well recognized brand in the area, complete with bumper stickers and everything.  It’s incredibly weird how much of Motel Hell is completely resistant to the fact that this is a horror film, or that it’s a comedy for that matter. 

Like a good chunk of the movie is just dedicated to Farmer Vincent and his meat/hotel business by the side of the highway and the romance that ends up blossoming between him and the survivor of a nearby motorcycle accident Terry.  It’s almost like two different films were somehow spliced together because occasionally said story of entrepreneurship and romance is interrupted by a ludicrous grindhouse horror flick involving cannibalism and people harvesting.

Yeah that’s sort of the “joke” of Motel Hell, that most of the movie is a more or less straight romance that happens to involve a psycho cannibal cook as the romantic male lead.  If you haven’t picked up on it Vincent’s famous smoked meats are, obviously enough, people.  However, rather than simply stopping at the basics of “hotel owner kills and eats people” Motel Hell feels the need to go one stop more ridiculous.  What Vincent and his menacing sister Ida actually do is they engineer accidents on the nearby roadway as a way to kidnap unsuspecting motorists.  Then, they burry the motorists neck deep in soil, remove their vocal chords, and keep them alive till harvesting time when they use a tractor to break their necks and pull them from the Earth.  Even though the idea is horrific in concept it’s honestly too ridiculous to take at all seriously in the film. 

That happens sometimes, an idea can be very creepy on paper but seeing people actually carry out the mechanics of this kind of people management drains a lot of the horror from the act. Regardless, that’s the secret of Farmer Vincent’s meats; he creates the traps while his sister maintains the captured human meat and the sheriff doesn’t look too closely because he’s Vincent’s brother Bruce.  Interestingly the Wrong Turn series likes to borrow super heavily from Motel Hell as it’s copied all of these plot points across its 6 film run.

All of that is the interesting stuff about Motel Hell.  The weird, insane oddity of someone actually trying to force these disparate parts together into a coherent whole is the genuinely engaging part of the story because the movie itself is really kinda lame.  The jokey set-up of a romance story staffed with horror characters and business is a good gimmick and fun to say but it doesn’t really make for an engaging story.  Farmer Vincent is too nice and genuine a character to really get that hung up on the murdering while his sister Ida is too non-present to really impact the plot, though there is a decidedly out of nowhere scene where she tries to drown Terry for seemingly no reason. 

Speaking of which, Terry really is the film’s most problematic element.  I’m sure it wasn’t intentional for her to end up the kind of punching back she did but man does the film throw her into a lot of uncomfortable situations.  She ends up falling in love with Vincent even though we, the audience, know Vincent basically killed her boyfriend and came very close to turning her into human sausage as well.  What’s more there’s an amazingly tone deaf scene where the Sheriff tries to get it on with her and won’t take no for an answer.  It’s not written as like a rape scene but man does it feel like that’s where things were headed and it’s supremely uncomfortable, especially because the film doesn’t realize how much of a sleazy monster it makes the Sheriff. 

There is however one saving grace to Motel Hell and it’s really key to understanding why this movie is so remembered by so many.  At the end of the film Farmer Vincent and Ida’s crimes are revealed to Terry and Sheriff Bruce as things quickly deteriorate at the motel and its adjacent slaughterhouse.  At the height of this climax comes possibly the greatest scene ever when Farmer Vincent dawns a hollowed out pig head as a mask and goes on a chainsaw rampage trying to cut up Terry and Sheriff Bruce.  It’s an amazing sequence that lasts a full 5 minutes as he laughs maniacally and chases the two through the slaughterhouse in something between a fever dream and a waking nightmare.  This scene is really the main reason anyone remembers Motel Hell, along with some of the earlier sequences set in the human garden.  The movie has a handful of incredibly surreal but still evocative and horrific images that just end up stuck in your brain, especially if you watch this late at night.

I wouldn’t recommend watching Motel Hell as the strangeness of the subject never really justifies the running time but if you’re curious both the chainsaw fight and the human garden scenes are available on Youtube and are worth checking out.  I’ve read the film was originally intended to be a straight horror film but due to budget restrictions was forced to be come a comedy, which seems fairly accurate.  The awkward pacing and bizarre structure of the movie feel fairly made up on the fly and the schizophrenic tone would suggest a lot of script re-writes.  Still, those two visuals of the pig masked chainsaw willing madman and his garden of heads are the stuff of nightmares and have ended up as essentially everyone’s quintessential idea of a grindhouse film.  Even if the film itself is flawed those visuals are burned into our collective imagination forever regardless of quality, sort of like Robot Monster but for ‘80s grindhouse instead of ‘50s B-movies.  Tomorrow we head back to the 2000s for a personal favorite. 


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