‘It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent Fritters...’
What happens if you mix The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Psycho but then add a large helping of ‘comedy’ into the mix? Well, Motel Hell happens, and bad cinema happens. Horror fans will watch any old shit and call it a cult classic, and I know for a fact that Kevin Connor’s film has its admirers (Roger Ebert for one – remarkable), but I found this to be a mostly drab and joyless affair…
Farmer Vincent Smith (Rory Calhoun) murders, harvests and then eats his victims from his roadside motel. That’s pretty much it. Somehow, this paper-thin plot is stretched out over 102 punishing minutes. I’d do anything to get that time back now, but, alas, it is gone, like tears in the rain.
The problem with attempting to satirise Texas Chainsaw and Psycho is that they are both works of innate genius, so to successfully lampoon them, you need to be operating on an incredibly high level of intellect and creativity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Motel Hell is not the film to achieve this lofty ambition. The Simpsons are possibly responsible for the greatest film parodies of all time over the years but this film is closer to the output of the Scary Movie franchise. Namely, not funny, not frightening, not clever, or insightful or even surprising in any way. They just simply are. Having said that, Calhoun is great, the film contains some genuinely incredible horror imagery (pigman chainsaw attack, harvested heads with no vocal cords silently screaming into the night sky), but it’s not enough to distract from the fact that for large stretches, Motel Hell is either dull, repulsive or both at the same time.
While I’ve easily seen fifty horror films worse than Motel Hell, this is yet another so-called cult classic that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
