Directed by Wayne Berwick

Starring Jackie Vernon and Claire Ginsberg

A man just can’t take his wife’s cooking anymore and drunkenly murders her…then sticks her in the microwave…and discovers he likes eating people?  That’s pretty far fetched. 

Review

A construction worker named Donald can’t stand his wife’s latest cooking trend of making exotic meals instead of anything he would like to eat.  He’s constantly teased by his sandwich-eating co-workers for his silly lunches, which apparently consist of a whole crab between two giant loaves of bread. After one of many fights involving her rotten cooking, he goes out and gets plastered only to come back and murder her with a salt shaker.  Donald wakes up the next day and discovers her body inside a microwave she had recently bought.  What’s a guy to do but cook her up and try it out?  That’s a logical step to take, right?

Presented without comment.

He discovers that human flesh tastes better than anything before and uses the microwave to cook up more of his wife since his co-workers also enjoy the taste of this new meat and Donald starts to run out.  He starts to go out at night and convince hookers to come back to his place where he chops them up, after having his fun first, and creates new dishes to enjoy later on with his friends.

The movie desperately wants to be funny at any cost but it never even comes close to being funny.  The trailer advertises the film as “the worst horror movie ever” and while I’m not going argue that bold claim, it’s a desperate plea to watch the film simply because it’s so awful it must be entertaining.  You’ll love how awful this movie is, it’s the worst!  It’s a statement that works for few movies, something like “Troll 2” gets by because it’s entertainingly awful at every turn you can’t wait to see what happens next.  “Microwave Massacre” is boring as hell and took me several attempts to get through it’s 75-minute run time.  Fuck this movie.

Mayonnaise ruins everything!

The acting from the majority of the cast probably rates as well as any of the porn films of the same era.  The worst part comes from Jackie Vernon who plays Donald.  You may not know who he is but if you’re a fan of Christmas specials you would remember his voice as Frosty in 1969’s “Frosty the Snowman” special.  Vernon was an entertainer and comedian but whatever he was supposed to bring to this film bombs hard.  He isn’t funny, in fact he’s more annoying than anything.  He frequently talks to himself trying to make funny comments about every situation, he even talks to the camera a few times and we even get to watch him make funny faces while watching a TV commercial with lots of profanity.  This movie can’t even scratch the bottom of the barrel trying to find a laugh.  But hey, it’s a trashy movie, so it must excel at that, right?

While there is a fair amount of female nudity on display, the filmmakers intent on delivering “comedy” means there are scenes involving Vernon humping the ladies or even using a gigantic knife to spread mayonnaise on their naked bodies.  Seriously.  At least the gore must be there…right?!  I’m not sure what kind of microwave this is, but all we ever see in it are obviously fake body parts that look pretty uncooked to me.  The majority of the blood comes from Vernon cutting the bodies up into pieces, which he of course treats as a joke most of the time.  He keeps his wife’s head in the fridge so he has a prop to interact with.  Really…fuck this movie.

I’m not even going to try to explain this.

There is nothing “good” about how bad this movie is.  It’s a godawful, unwatchable mess of a film.  It’s barely a film!  It fails as a comedy but as a horror movie it’s barely represented as such.  Sure the guy is killing women and eating them, that’s awful, but there’s no tension derived from these situations.  No one even catches on to Donald and these missing women.  His wife’s sister shows up and he ties her up in a closet unwilling to eat her but that aside, no one is trying to stop him.  He’s only stopped when (SPPPOOOILLLEERR!!!) he’s found dead by his friends because his pacemaker gave out while he was using the microwave!  Fuuuuck this movie!

TL;DR

Story: 1 – Idiotic plot, porn-quality acting and the worst attempts at comedy make this relatively short film drag on and on. 

Blood: 2 – Very disappointing use of the title microwave using bargain basement effects. 

Nudity: 6 – These poor women must’ve really needed the money.

Overall: 1 – “Microwave Massacre” fails to deliver anything remotely entertaining and really misses the point of what “so bad, it’s good” means. 

Trivia

-Jackie Vernon died not long after the film came out.  Probably from shame.

-Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens, near unrecognizable with long hair and a beard, has a brief cameo near the end of the film.

-Rodney Dangerfield was considered for the role of Donald but wanted too much money.