Motel Hell (1980)

My first ever trip to the United States happened to be in October, and it also happened to be during an unprecedented horror movie boom with cinemas littered with horror movie titles like never before.  It was a short trip, and I had to manage my time shrewdly to take in as much as possible.  In the UK, back in those days, we used to get films months after they were released in the US, and often the lesser-known or more brutal horror films hardly made it across the waters in the era that was the infancy of home video.  The cinemas were showing Dressed to Kill, Fade to Black, The Fog was still showing, Maniac was on, Mother’s Day had just opened, Terror Train was on, Phantasm could still be found, and Motel Hell was due to open on the coming Friday.  I was like a kid in a candy store, and we happened to be shacked up in some sleazy hotel bang in the middle of the hubbub of Times Square, and believe me, it wasn’t the sanitised, family-friendly place back in 1980.  Times Square was arguably the sleaziest square mile on the planet in those days, with 42^nd Street being the jewel in the crown, and the walk with my highly respectable father to get to the greyhound station will always be etched in my memory.  Where there were topless shows and sex booths, now stands Madame Tussauds and The Disney shop!  Personally speaking, I was in heaven, and a dozen different horror movies were screening within a stone’s throw from my hotel room.  The sleaze, the grime, the drugs, the winos, the prostitutes…. they were not my focus at all, and thus I didn’t really notice them!

I had already earmarked the Embassy cinema a couple of blocks down on Broadway, where I was scheduled to catch Terror Train before Motel Hell was to replace it the next day. I rolled up to the cinema at 9.30 AM or thereabouts for the morning show and watched Jamie Lee Curtis and David Copperfield and that glorious Groucho Marx mask all alone in a fairly large cinema, which was far more unnerving than anything on screen.  On my way out, I picked up a ticket for the nighttime show on opening night for Motel Hell, expecting a fun time with a packed first-night audience.

Indeed, it being Times Square, there was an eclectic and knowledgeable bunch gathered for Motel Hell, all pumped up and lubricated and popcorned up for a fun 90 minutes ahead.  It took a while for the audience to get to terms with the sluggish pacing and the fact that they were not going to be terrified out of their wits but rather tickled with a dark little black comedy/satire that pokes fun at the whole Ed Gein genre, specifically, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho as well. 
The film is about Farmer Vincent, who has earned a reputation for the finest smoked meats not only in America but in fact the entire world.  People travel from far and wide to get a taste of his smoked wares.  Old Man Vincent and his companion, Ida, run the business and thoroughly enjoy themselves at their work, preparing, curing, and then smoking their meats with love and diligence. 

Farmer Vincent enjoys being creative with his bear traps, using them to snare fresh victims, which are then mixed with great skill with the swine meat to create mouthwatering delicacies, for which he is so renowned. 

The method is simple; Vincent lays his traps in various shapes and forms and entices potential meat to the area, which he then snares and hands over to Ida, who deftly operates on their vocal cords so they can be fattened up like Hansel and Gretel without creating an appalling racket with their constant whining and screaming.

The humour is laid on thick; there are one or two memorable lines, and the film moves along nicely as a macabre black comedy that is constantly amusing but rarely funny in the way that Peter Jackson’s outrageous Dead Alive was.  It’s more of a grinning and chuckling sort of humour rather than overt laugh out loud territory as Dead Alive or Army of Darkness and yet it certainly succeeds in being constantly amusing and occasionally a little grim as well but never the scary film that perhaps the opening night crowd were expecting and the audience was getting restless before the climax somewhat makes up for the languid pacing of what came before. 

Those expecting a frightening film will feel let down, but those who have some patience and enjoy a little dark humour may well enjoy the film, which has aged fairly well and plays far better when you know not to expect a scary movie, which it very clearly isn’t.

Motel Hell is a mildly amusing entry that went against the grain in an era dominated by Halloween and Friday the 13^th clones, and perhaps that is the movie’s greatest strength in that it was refreshingly and most definitely not a clone by any stretch of imagination but a unique entity in its own right.  Pleasantly surprised to find that Kevin Conway, the director, is British.