The Corpse Grinders [1971]

After having to tell Adam that we literally already watched Run Like Hell a month ago (yes, that's how unmemorable it was), we turned to this film, The Corpse Grinders, not a black metal band and really not very metal at all.

The plot is very simple: a cat food company is paying a gravedigger with a mentally ill wife and some really weird morticians as part of a scheme to get dead bodies that can be ground up for cat food. The gravedigger provides the bodies and the morticians embalm them with some kind of pork-flavored fluid to make them extra tasty. This cat food is causing cats everywhere to go crazy and murder their humans since they now know the joys of the manflesh. There's a doctor and nurse duo who figure this out and try to stop them. 

At only an hour and 15 minutes this movie is just the right length to not be too long and to not feel too long. It's not painful, it's just simplistic. Technically it's fairly competent and the acting is kind of bad in a somewhat funny but not overly hilarious way. It's not a bad experience, but it's not one I would insist on.

Spoon Rating: 3

They Saved Hitler's Brain [1968]

This film wasn't really the plan for the evening, but our actual plans were thwarted by the cruel fates. Let me tell you the tale. In a small neighborhood of a nearby small city there once dwelled a shop called Movie Town, a shop right out of the bygone era of the 1990s. I last went sometime around 2016 and was startled to find that it had a plentiful stock of used VHS tapes and a corner curtained off to conceal porn, both DVD and VHS. Not a Bluray to be found in this forgotten land. We got some really bad VHS movies there and were pretty darn certain it was a drug front. How else could it stay in business in the 2010s? Alas, it could not survive into the 2020s when so many more worthy businesses have failed and the spot is now vacant but with its handmade-looking sign still up and a printed out sign on the door saying that it is merely closed for renovations. I'll believe it when I see it. So instead of some bespoke masterpiece selected from this anachronistic shop, we picked this film from a 50 pack of horror movies because the title was funny. Trust me when I say my Movie Town diatribe is a better story than this one.

For the first half hour or so we were genuinely convinced we were watching the wrong film. The plot seemed to be about some kind of dangerous nerve gas and the kidnapping of a scientist who made an antidote for it. Eventually we get to the fact that Hitler's brain (whole head actually) was preserved and brought down to the Caribbean nation of Mandoras, feeding into that whole "Hitler's hiding somewhere in South America" conspiracy that was once popular. Some other scientist and his impressively stupid wife go there and get kidnapped by some Nazis, who want to nerve gas the whole island for some reason. It's wildly boring.

There were a few laughs to be had but it took a very long time to get there. The image of Hitler's head in a jar that is extremely Futurama? Fun. The dumb wife asking what happened after literally watching the man next to her get shot in a drive by? Delightful. The door opening to show the Nazis standing on an upper stair so their heads are cut off? Perfectly incompetent. But the rest of the film sucked. Maybe we should have watched Vampire Night Orgy instead. I blame Movie Town.

Spoon Rating: 2

The Octagon [1980]

This is a big moment. For a long time we have been working through a stack of movies that were acquired from the Book Barn so that we could assess their potential, and we have finally come to the last one. This Chuck Norris film may be the origin of the fighting stadium of the title name but unfortunately this movie didn't involve any folding chairs. Honestly, it barely involved any fighting. Or plot. It did have some really standout insane lines but at what cost?

The basic premise is that Chuck Norris at one point was trained as a ninja by his dad and alongside his brother. His brother got disowned and that brother went on to create a ninja mercenary training school while Chuck went on to live a normal life. The first thirty minutes of the movie are a series of seemingly unrelated scenes of ninja training at the school, Chuck going on a date who gets killed by ninjas later, a rich dude getting shot up, a younger rich lady asking Chuck to help her with her car, Chuck's friend fighting a sailor guy, etc. Somehow this all culminates in Chuck needing to fight his brother in the octagon at his training school. That's the last five minutes of the movie more or less and the journey to get there is long. At one point Adam and Sarah's daughter Jade leaned on the remote and fast forwarded a bit and we decided to just go with it.

The unfortunate thing is that this movie actually has some really hilarious lines. The screenwriter made some bold attempts at philosophical that do not work at all including the wonderful, "why are the peanuts always at the other end of the bar?" You could probably make a great two minute supercut. However, it's not actually worth it to subject yourself to the whole film just for the few bits.

Spoon Rating: 3