THE CORPSE GRINDERS (1971)

Director: Ted V. Mikels

Writers: Arch Hall, Joe Cranston

Producer: Ted V. Mikels

Cast: Sean Kenney, Monika Kelley, Sanford Mitchell, J. Byron Foster, Warren Ball, Ann Noble, Zena Foster, Harry Lovejoy, Vincent Barbi, Ray Dannis, Earl Burnham, Drucilla Hoy, Charles ‘Foxy’ Fox, Stephen Lester, William Kirschner, Andy Collings, Curt Matson, Sherri Vernon, Mary Ellen Burke, George Bowden, Don Ellis, Mike Garrison, Richard Gilden 

Domestic cats are attacking their human owners. The ferocious felines are consumers of Lotus Cat Food. The secret ingredient in that brand of cat chow is human flesh, which turns pets into man-eaters. The corner-cutting managers of the Lotus Cat Food Company acquire their illegal additives from a local cemetery, a funeral home, and hired thugs who abduct street derelicts. The harvested bodies are fed into a corpse-grinding machine that mixes them with grain to produce that special feline delicacy. 

The Flashback Fanatic movie review 

Former magician and stage performer Ted V. Mikels had started his own film production company in Bend, Oregon making short films and documentaries. During the late 1950s, he had also done stunts for three Hollywood Westerns shot in Oregon. Once Mikels decided to start producing and directing his own feature films in the 1960s, he went the exploitation route making films with attention-getting titles and lurid posters that had to hook an audience looking for cheap thrills. The trick was to make cheap productions that could still live up to their genre hoopla. 

Operating outside of the Hollywood studio system meant struggling to scrape up funds to make feature films on incredibly low budgets. A great cost-saving measure for Mikels was having film-editing facilities in his own Glendale, California home that he called “The Castle.” Then Mikels’ live-in assortment of women he called his “castle ladies” would learn various film production duties by contributing their labor to his projects. During Mikels’ polygamous relationships with these women, he educated them in filmmaking techniques that they could use in their own film endeavors. 

It stands to reason that any director as independent and eccentric as this would make an oddball assortment of films. The quirks in a Ted V. Mikels film are usually as a result of aspiring to more than the lack of funds can provide. Nevertheless, a Ted V. Mikels film tried to check off the exploitation boxes to satisfy the drive-in crowd. This usually meant dredging up film tropes old and new realized in easily accessible locations and a few, small, studio-built sets. Many great films have been made with limited means. They used whatever they had access to and made the script and situations conform to those resources. How well a Ted V. Mikels film managed that sleight of hand usually determined its level of entertainment. 

Mikels’ most famous films are the ones blessed with the best titles: The Astro-Zombies (1968) and The Corpse Grinders. Those titles tell you exactly what your expectations should be and all those movies need to provide are lurid thrills. The challenge for Mikels was to pull that off on his miniscule budgets. The challenge for lovers of schlock is to justify our interest in these frugal productions. 

The Corpse Grinders has a title so unsavory that the only expectation for this film is to scrape the bottom of the bad-taste barrel. I find that to be a valid goal to strive for. Bad taste can be absolutely liberating for a filmmaker and the audience. Sometimes that can also become art if it has wit, a theme to explore, or a point to make.

In The Corpse Grinders, the motives of the films’ villains are as cost-conscious as the filmmakers: Do it on the cheap and still provide a profitable product. That makes perfect business sense, but that anything-for-a-buck mentality can lead to evil. While this exploitation quickie is not intent on feeding us any social message, its food for thought is that business interests are often not in the public interest. 

This may be the cheapest feature film Mikels ever made. Due to a combination of low budgets and strange wardrobe and decorating choices, Mikels’ films are always full of seedy atmosphere, but he has really outdone himself here. There are a few cramped, sparsely furnished sets. One set painted entirely white is meant to be a doctor’s hospital office furnished with little more than a small microscope suitable for a middle school biology class and a set of encyclopedias. Quincy, M.E. be damned, that’s all our surgeon and nurse protagonists need to figure out why the furious felines are using their owners’ throats for scratching posts. A few tombstones, a shallow hole in the ground, and fog machines on Mikels’ property represent a cemetery. The entire music score seems to be lifted from library tracks. Having a cast of unknowns also kept the costs down. 

What everyone remembers about this mad movie is the corpse-grinding machine and the economic ingenuity used to create it. For a whopping $38, this fiendish prop was built out of plywood and adorned with a big lever and blinking lights. A small conveyor belt passes the bodies into the front-end opening, within which we see spinning blades salvaged from a push lawnmower. At the other end of this crazy contraption, a mixture of hamburger and sawdust, representing the ground-up corpses and grain, oozes out into a grubby bucket. Bon appétit, kitties! 

While Mikels’ previous horror film, The Astro-Zombies, could boast of a few interesting names in the cast (John Carradine, Tura Satana, and Wendell Corey), The Corpse Grinders’ no-name cast is only distinguished by their characters’ eccentricities. Caleb (Warren Ball), the grave-robbing cemetery caretaker, is always gnawing on strips of beef jerky. His dotty companion, Cleo (Ann Noble), is always toting around a doll that she treats like her child. The nervous Maltby (J. Byron Foster), one of the villainous pair managing the Lotus Cat Food Company, expresses necrophilic urges. His cold-blooded partner in crime, Landau (Sanford Mitchell), is surprisingly protective of Tessie (Drucilla Hoy), the mute, one-legged, middle-aged woman employed at the cat food factory. Landau even manages to communicate with her using sign language (with gestures so repetitive that they probably translate as stuttering). All of these quirks are never elaborated on and serve no character motivation or plot purpose. They are not even exploited for broad humor. These antics are probably just meant to give these one-dimensional characters something to do, as there is nothing in the way of drama or character development going on here. 

Our heroic leads, Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and his nurse and girlfriend, Angie Robinson (Monika Kelley), are driven to expose the cause of the cat attacks because we need a good-looking couple to root for. Since Angie’s own cat attacked Howard after eating Lotus Cat Food, I suppose it’s personal. I knew that Sean Kenney had starred in the very weird, sexploitation-horror flick The Toy Box (1971), but I was surprised to learn that he also had played the scarred, disabled, and mute Captain Christopher Pike in the two-part episode “The Menagerie” of the original Star Trek TV series (1966-1969). 

Served with cheap and sordid simplicity, I find The Corpse Grinders to be humble fare that has become an acquired taste. There is a cockeyed sense of humor seasoning this diabolical din-din that I can appreciate. When trying to turn a buck making cat food leads to grave robbing and murder, I can’t help but purr in satisfaction.