It's easy to look at something like Mountaintop Motel Massacre and think, God, what a piece of shit. I'm sure the majority of movie lovers would do so. Horror lovers have a different perspective.
These rural, backwoods productions are often a wonder to behold. People like Mountaintop Motel Massacre writer/director Jim McCullough Sr. took ingenuity, determination, and guts to make something they figured would, at best, play drive-in theaters and earn them a few bucks in profit. Then the movies would disappear. But horror fans never forget, and movies like Mountaintop Motel Massacre become the stuff of legend.
Sure, you can call Mountaintop Motel Massacre inept, cheap, tawdry, and crass, with bargain basement acting and amateur effects. But these exploitation/grindhouse/drive-in movies work on the psyche on a primal level. With the proper approach they hit a viewer in a visceral way, a gut-punch rather than a cerebral experience.
I like most of these older, low budget horror movies. To me it's much more honest filmmaking than the digital techniques employed today. Most movies look too flashy now and they lack the vitality of ones shot and edited on film.
There were a lot of these type of movies made, and I consider Mountaintop Motel Massacre to be one of the better ones. Not on par with something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead, surely, but better than a lot of stuff I've seen.
Our story begins with Evelyn, a batty old lady throwing a fit over her daughter messing with occult practices. This is in a shitpile motel somewhere in the Louisiana boonies. Obviously crazy, Evelyn brandishes her sickle and demolishes the girl's witchy shrine, but whoops, she ends up killing the poor thing. The murder is covered up, and life in cheery Mountaintop Motel commences business.
It's a busy night, as a storm has hit and several people are stuck staying at the titular flophouse. Already unhinged, Evelyn's actions have driven her completely off the rails, and she begins to dispatch her unfortunate guests. She employs rats, snakes, cockroaches, and of course her trusty sickle.
That's about it for the plot, but Mountaintop Motel Massacre is executed with a fair amount of flair and a whole lot of verve. I have to credit McCullough and his team for giving their all to make this humble production visually interesting and reasonably suspenseful.
It's typical for movies like these to invest part of their meager finances to get a low-level Hollywood face to appear in their movies. It's often a down-on-his-luck character actor, and in the case of Mountaintop Motel Massacre the "star" is Bill Thurmon, a recognizable face who worked with Bogdanovich and Spielberg, but also appeared in Keep My Grave Open, Gator Bait, Mars Needs Women, and Larry Buchanan's racially explosive High Yellow. It looks as though Thurmon was largely paid in bourbon.
Mountaintop Motel Massacre was lensed in 1983, but didn't get theatrical distribution until 1986. It came out as both Mountaintop Motel and Horror at Mountaintop Motel. When New World Pictures released the movie on videocassette, it went out under the snazzier title we now know and love.
Way back then Fangoria ran a piece on Mountaintop Motel Massacre, and there was a photo of a women whose cheeks were impaled by a sickle. That sort of thing caught my interest in those days, and I was desperate to see it. And see it I did, when a group of friends and I rented a handful of tapes to watch one Saturday. I liked the movie a lot, and most of my friends seemed to enjoy it too.
Now Vinegar Syndrome has released Mountaintop Motel Massacre in a crisp blu-ray that looks and sounds absolutely terrific. The old tape was murky and this new edition makes the movie look like Argento. Well, latter day Argento.
Written by Mark Sieber
These rural, backwoods productions are often a wonder to behold. People like Mountaintop Motel Massacre writer/director Jim McCullough Sr. took ingenuity, determination, and guts to make something they figured would, at best, play drive-in theaters and earn them a few bucks in profit. Then the movies would disappear. But horror fans never forget, and movies like Mountaintop Motel Massacre become the stuff of legend.
Sure, you can call Mountaintop Motel Massacre inept, cheap, tawdry, and crass, with bargain basement acting and amateur effects. But these exploitation/grindhouse/drive-in movies work on the psyche on a primal level. With the proper approach they hit a viewer in a visceral way, a gut-punch rather than a cerebral experience.
I like most of these older, low budget horror movies. To me it's much more honest filmmaking than the digital techniques employed today. Most movies look too flashy now and they lack the vitality of ones shot and edited on film.
There were a lot of these type of movies made, and I consider Mountaintop Motel Massacre to be one of the better ones. Not on par with something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead, surely, but better than a lot of stuff I've seen.
Our story begins with Evelyn, a batty old lady throwing a fit over her daughter messing with occult practices. This is in a shitpile motel somewhere in the Louisiana boonies. Obviously crazy, Evelyn brandishes her sickle and demolishes the girl's witchy shrine, but whoops, she ends up killing the poor thing. The murder is covered up, and life in cheery Mountaintop Motel commences business.
It's a busy night, as a storm has hit and several people are stuck staying at the titular flophouse. Already unhinged, Evelyn's actions have driven her completely off the rails, and she begins to dispatch her unfortunate guests. She employs rats, snakes, cockroaches, and of course her trusty sickle.
That's about it for the plot, but Mountaintop Motel Massacre is executed with a fair amount of flair and a whole lot of verve. I have to credit McCullough and his team for giving their all to make this humble production visually interesting and reasonably suspenseful.
It's typical for movies like these to invest part of their meager finances to get a low-level Hollywood face to appear in their movies. It's often a down-on-his-luck character actor, and in the case of Mountaintop Motel Massacre the "star" is Bill Thurmon, a recognizable face who worked with Bogdanovich and Spielberg, but also appeared in Keep My Grave Open, Gator Bait, Mars Needs Women, and Larry Buchanan's racially explosive High Yellow. It looks as though Thurmon was largely paid in bourbon.
Mountaintop Motel Massacre was lensed in 1983, but didn't get theatrical distribution until 1986. It came out as both Mountaintop Motel and Horror at Mountaintop Motel. When New World Pictures released the movie on videocassette, it went out under the snazzier title we now know and love.
Way back then Fangoria ran a piece on Mountaintop Motel Massacre, and there was a photo of a women whose cheeks were impaled by a sickle. That sort of thing caught my interest in those days, and I was desperate to see it. And see it I did, when a group of friends and I rented a handful of tapes to watch one Saturday. I liked the movie a lot, and most of my friends seemed to enjoy it too.
Now Vinegar Syndrome has released Mountaintop Motel Massacre in a crisp blu-ray that looks and sounds absolutely terrific. The old tape was murky and this new edition makes the movie look like Argento. Well, latter day Argento.
Written by Mark Sieber
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