“It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters.”
How’s this for a shocking premise: brother and sister duo Vincent (Rory Calhoun) and Ida Smith (Nancy Parsons), owners of Motel Hello (the second neon “o” has gone dark), get their rocks off by luring travelers into their seedy backwoods lodge, rendering them unconscious, then burying them up to their necks in their garden. They slice their vocal cords so they can only speak in hisses and snarls. After a few weeks of fattening up, they’re ripped from the ground by the neck, slaughtered, sent into Vincent’s smokehouse, and processed into an array of meat products that are sold over the counter at the motel. People flock from miles around because Vincent’s secret recipe produces the most delectable meats that anyone’s ever tasted. Such a ridiculous story idea that is perfectly suited for the horror comedy genre.
Motel Hell is great because it manages to strike a balance between absurd perversion and jocularity. This is exemplified when a couple of swingers show up at the motel, attracted by a fake ad placed by Vincent. They’re all giggly and boisterous and eager to break out their whips and leather. They allow Vincent to tie them up because they’re into that sort of thing. When Ida pulls out the “laughing gas” they eagerly push their faces into the mask to inhale it. And the deed is complete—two more for the smokehouse. Business as usual for Vincent and Ida. It’s an absurdly gross interaction presented in a comically lighthearted manner. And that’s the film in a nutshell—gags and goofy moments countered by gory imagery and horrific implications. How one jibes with that unique tonal silliness will determine their enjoyment of the entire film. I happen to think it’s quite good.
Terry (Nina Axelrod) provides the audience with a view of the Smiths from outside of their peculiar relationship. When she and her boyfriend Bo (Everett Creach) “wreck” their motorcycle near the motel, Bo “dies” (he’s sent to the garden, alive) and Vincent rescues her. Rather than send her to the garden, he decides to nurse her back to health. Why Terry stays at the motel is never explained. Her boyfriend died and she somehow doesn’t find it odd that Vincent just buried him on the farm and didn’t contact any authorities. She apparently has no life or family elsewhere and instead makes the motel her new home, Vincent and Ida her new family. She remains oblivious to Vincent and Ida’s misdeeds, and begins to fall in love with Vincent’s charm, even more so when he saves her from drowning in the family’s pond. Vincent comes to like her so much that he ends up proposing and speaks to the town Reverend (Wolfman Jack) about it.
Where the film seems to lose steam is in trying to develop an actual story around the deeply strange premise. It takes about half the film to establish the ins and outs of Vincent and Ida’s farm/slaughterhouse/motel setup and their warped relational dynamic. But once we have a grasp of that, there isn’t anything else that offers that level of peculiar interest. Despite a few individually good scenes, this middle portion of the film feels very weak compared to the opening. The suspense dwindles. In its place, I think we’re meant to simply enjoy the family’s eccentricities and find amusement in their nonchalant use of humans as a food source. Their guarding of their secret like it’s just an old family recipe is humorous, but not that humorous. By the time Vincent is wearing a pig’s head and wielding a chainsaw—truly the stuff that B-movies exist as vehicles for—it’s simply too little too late.
But this image—Vincent in a pig’s head vs. his younger brother, Sheriff Bruce Smith (Paul Linke)—is a prime example of the rich imagery that makes Motel Hell such a delight for horror fans. Vincent’s smokehouse with all its meat hooks, dangling strings of human sausage, and pigs’ heads; the garden area where our voiceless victims hiss at the cheerful brother and sister who tend to their needs; the cardboard cutouts of cows that Vincent uses to block the road, luring a young lady out of her vehicle; the floating phalanges that Ida tries to hide in plain sight when Terry finds her way into the smokehouse.
Originally Motel Hell was to be a straight horror film directed by Tobe Hooper, with a script featuring bestiality and little comic relief. It would have rounded out an unofficial trilogy of “cannibal” movies for him, in addition to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Eaten Alive. But it was too filthy for some studio execs, and so it changed hands and Kevin Connor was brought on board. Although the finished product has little resemblance to Tobe Hooper’s early films (aside from the element of cannibalism and the inclusion of a chainsaw), it seems to have had a strong influence on Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
Motel Hell is certainly an odd duck. It moves with a leisurely pace and has a single fleshed out character. It’s amusing but not hilarious, disturbing but not frightening. Rory Calhoun carries the film with his dynamic performance as a psychopathic serial killer presenting as a good old country boy. Aside from him, it’s slim pickings. But that cheerfully disturbing tone is something that few other films have gone for, and it’s realized perfectly for large swaths of the film. If only they’d leaned into that original, more shocking script, and pushed this to its limits.