Humor and horror don't easily mix together into a solid, cohesive, evenly balanced and satisfactory whole. It takes real skill and expertise to make such a precarious blending of diametrically opposite elements work well together. Well, this totally ineffective and often painfully unamusing clinker makes for a particularly sad example of just how horrendous a horror comedy can be when said necessary skill and expertise never manage to materialize in the film itself.
Late, great wiseguy comedian Jackie Vernon portrays a meek, hen-pecked construction worker who offs his peevish wench of a shrewish wife, chops her up into itty-bitty pieces, wraps the body parts up in tin foil, and stuffs the remains in a freezer. One day Jackie noshes on some of his old lady's remains and subsequently develops an unsavory cannibalistic hankering for tasty female flesh. Pretty soon Jackie starts killing comely, flirtatious, available young lasses so he can ravenously eat their sweet delicious meat in order to appease his insatiable sicko appetite.
Wayne Beswick's flaccid direction fails to inject any much-needed hopped-up vitality into this tired'n'tasteless tripe, thus letting "Microwave Massacre" crawl along at an excruciatingly gradual and seemingly never-ending lethargic tempo. The unceasingly crude catalog of bad big breast jokes, cheesy gold chains, poor prostitute japes, hideously unsightly mountainous masses of overpermed curly white guy Afro coiffures, silly swinging singles jests, moronic profanity jibes, scanty denim hot pants, putrid fake penis gags, shabby bell bottom jeans, and sophomoric sexual hi-jinks all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cheerfully rancid'n'raunchy 70's bathroom humor has dated as well as the leisure suit and 8-track tapes (i.e., not well at all). However, Jackie tries admirably in a rare substantial lead role; his droll, low-key sense of nicely bemused "why me?" humor supplies some faint entertainment in this otherwise extremely tiresome junk. Acclaimed fright film production designer Robert Burns cameos as a mangy derelict who scratches his crotch with a severed arm he unearths in Jackie's garbage can. It's a genuine shame that the negative of this woefully unfunny would-be horror black comedy wasn't tossed in a trash can along with the witless script.
Late, great wiseguy comedian Jackie Vernon portrays a meek, hen-pecked construction worker who offs his peevish wench of a shrewish wife, chops her up into itty-bitty pieces, wraps the body parts up in tin foil, and stuffs the remains in a freezer. One day Jackie noshes on some of his old lady's remains and subsequently develops an unsavory cannibalistic hankering for tasty female flesh. Pretty soon Jackie starts killing comely, flirtatious, available young lasses so he can ravenously eat their sweet delicious meat in order to appease his insatiable sicko appetite.
Wayne Beswick's flaccid direction fails to inject any much-needed hopped-up vitality into this tired'n'tasteless tripe, thus letting "Microwave Massacre" crawl along at an excruciatingly gradual and seemingly never-ending lethargic tempo. The unceasingly crude catalog of bad big breast jokes, cheesy gold chains, poor prostitute japes, hideously unsightly mountainous masses of overpermed curly white guy Afro coiffures, silly swinging singles jests, moronic profanity jibes, scanty denim hot pants, putrid fake penis gags, shabby bell bottom jeans, and sophomoric sexual hi-jinks all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cheerfully rancid'n'raunchy 70's bathroom humor has dated as well as the leisure suit and 8-track tapes (i.e., not well at all). However, Jackie tries admirably in a rare substantial lead role; his droll, low-key sense of nicely bemused "why me?" humor supplies some faint entertainment in this otherwise extremely tiresome junk. Acclaimed fright film production designer Robert Burns cameos as a mangy derelict who scratches his crotch with a severed arm he unearths in Jackie's garbage can. It's a genuine shame that the negative of this woefully unfunny would-be horror black comedy wasn't tossed in a trash can along with the witless script.