Ted V. Mikels at his very worst (which is to say that it’s very, very bad indeed), The Corpse Grinders is his infamous tale of carnivorous cats driven to attacking humans after unscrupulous businessmen use human corpses in their cat food. As with most of Mikels’ films, it looks as though it was shot a good decade before it actually was and mostly consists of long, static shots of poorly lit bad actors (the cats give the most convincing turns here) in cramped sets.
Mikels’ other trait is coming up with outlandish plots that there simply isn’t a hope in hell that he’ll ever get the funding for, resulting in films with great exploitation titles, completely daft ideas and the shoddiest production values imaginable. Here we have the owners of a cat food production company digging their way out of a financial hole by using human corpses in their latest product. It has the unwanted side effect of turning any cat that eats it into vicious killers hungry for human flesh.
The corpse grinding machine itself is pathetic, a rickety looking cardboard box with a few controls precariously glued onto it. Mikels thinks that the best way to disguise the shortcomings of the horror factory that this stunning device sits in is to bathe it sickly green lighting, perhaps to disguise the fact that it seems to have been shot in someone’s shed. He’s wrong. Nothing he does can help audiences past the fact that the machine is the least threatening looking mechanical device ever committed to celluloid and that it looks nothing at all like the monstrosity featured on the various video and DVD sleeves.
For parts of the film, Mikels doesn’t even seem to be able to keep the camera in focus, but then his lighting is frequently so awful that he presumably felt that we wouldn’t notice. And, if the bewildering number of costume changes that Monika Kelly undergoes as Nurse Angie Robinson isn’t enough, continuity wasn’t much of an issue for him either. Unless she really was supposed to have a new outfit every time we see her which is what appears to be happening.
Performances are exactly what you’d expect from this sort of thing, full of fluffed lines, missed cues and self-conscious attempts to not look at the camera. For some reason, half of them seem to attempting English accents (why?) and one of them is Sean Kenney who, a few years before, had his highest profile role as the injured and immobile version of Captain Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter played the younger, fitter version) in the Star Trek (1966-1969) double episode The Menagerie. And you simply haven’t lived until you’ve seen Sanford Mitchell’s attempts at faking sign language for his deaf sidekick – it seems to mostly consist of him waggling his hand (singular) about, vaguely hoping that no-one will notice.
With sound that doesn’t stay in synch for more than a few seconds, terrible gore effects (cat lovers should be aware that the film features a not-terribly-convincing cat dissection), film grain that swarms around the screen like some strange new form of viral life and stock music library cues that blare at all the wrong moments, The Corpse Grinders is a real chore to sit through. Even the most hardened of Z-movie devotees will find this one well below their usual level of tolerance.
The EOFFTV Review 