MOTEL HELL

MOTEL HELL

Kevin Connor's film opens well enough, with Farmer Vincent (veteran actor Rory Calhoun) sat on the porch of his quiet country motel. He smokes a pipe contently as Lance Rubin's soft score adds an air of calm to the mild night setting. To Vincent's right, a neon sign glows in red: "MOTEL HELLO". The "O" suffers from a permanently faulty electrical connection, and therefore constantly flickers between on and off - often lending the impression that the sign reads "MOTEL HELL"...

The music takes a sinister turn as Vincent goes indoors and swiftly reappears armed with his shotgun. The farmer hops in his truck and takes a midnight drive to a quiet spot near the neighbouring woods.

Overlooking the quiet main road from his hiding spot, Vincent lies in wait for the next vehicle to appear. Before long, a motorcycle and sidecar combo roars into view - only to blow a tyre and spin off the road seconds later. Racing to the scene of the 'accident', Vincent observes that the cyclist is dead, and humps his corpse onto the back of his truck. The female passenger - Terry (Nina Axelrod) - is alive but concussed. Vincent tosses her into the truck's passenger seat and returns to the motel.

As opening scenes go, the first ten minutes are quite tame - though they are well-shot and darkly humorous (the neon sign, etc). They're also nicely atmospheric thanks to Rubin's score, and the smoke-filled night air breathing menace into the woodland scenery. And things don't change much from hereon in ...

The plot is wafer-thin, and anyone who spends more than ten minutes trying to figure out what the secret ingredient may be in Farmer Vincent's celebrated beef steaks must surely possess even less intelligence than the people willing to bid $50million+ on eBay for a house where Eminem once lived as a teenager ...!!

Okay, so Farmer Vincent and his aide Ida (the excellent Nancy Parsons) run their quiet motel, where the sign outside always reads NO VACANCIES, as a front to hide their true business - a hidden garden based at the back of the motel where people are buried up to their necks in compost and force-fed natural foods until they are eventually ready to be harvested, and 'smoked'.

The film moves from one episodic confrontation to the next, with victims including a kinky couple, a nosy health inspector and a punk called Ivan And The Terribles - yes, that is John Ratzenberger (Cliff from TV sitcom "Cheers" as the drummer!).

As with the opening scenes, each terror scene is handled competently by director Kevin Connor (AT THE EARTH'S CORE; FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE), with a nice balance between the humorous one-liners and the eerie ambience that keeps us watching in anticipation ... Alas, however, MOTEL HELL holds back on hardcore horror trappings. And the grue is minimal - which while not being essential to make a good film, is pretty much what you expect when you come to a film such as this.

The film has two major strong points - the first being Robert and Steven-Charles Jaffe's script. At times extremely witty and offering Calhoun some great lines, where the script fails in providing background for many characters it does however give Vincent a nutty religious bent (the religious motif is carried further with the recurring cameo by Wolfman Jack as a TV evangelist), and even shows him to be delusional in believing his actions will help reduce the planet's over-population and feed the rest of the world! Wow, an eco-friendly psycho!!

The second strong point is the performances. Calhoun, in particular, appears to be loving every minute of playing the devilish Vincent. Parsons turns the thankless role of Vincent's side-kick Ida into her own, with an unnerving amount of backwoods authenticity. Paul Linke is notable too as the likeable (yet unlikely) hero Bruce.

Bruce is not only the local sheriff, but he's Vincent's brother and is madly in love with Terry - who has stuck around to recover from the opening crash, and the shock of learning of her boyfriend's death.

Overall, while competently made and with some wonderful set-piece scenes (the slaughterhouse finale is worth checking out - and uncut here, unlike the pre-cert UK VHS release on Warner), MOTEL HELL promises more than it manages to deliver. Perhaps the fact that it was distributed by United Artists/MGM goes some way to explaining why it never really hits the unapologetic heights of other horror films from it's era (1980). Consequently, we get a film that is always interesting but lacking the energy and balls-out commitment to the genre that could have elevated it to something more.

The UK disc is a bare-bones affair, offering nothing but the film itself and a ten-chapter scene selection menu. At 97 minutes, this appears to be the uncut print of the film (despite a dodgy-looking edit as one victim is about to have his vocal chords sliced).

The picture quality is excellent - no grain or artifacting, and the film's polished up really well considering it's age. Although the framing looks okay, the film's presented in 4:3 and I wouldn't like to say of that's the correct ratio. I suspect not (and I believe MGM's Region 1 disc - a double-bill with a slightly trimmed version of the superior DERANGED - lists the film as being presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic???). Sound is mono and while a tad on the quiet side, is free from hiss or drop-out.

Review by Stuart Willis


 
Released by ILC PRIME
Region All - Pal
Rated 18
Audio - English
Extras :
none
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