Horror Movie Review: The Corpse Grinders (1971)

Lotus cat food has an interesting ingredient that cats just love, human flesh! Yep, a dodgy cat food company has found a cheap way to get their supply of meat & it’s driving the cats wild!

The Corpse Grinders is the kind of movie that just screams ‘drive-in’, cheaply made with poor acting, minor gore & a plot that makes little sense. However it’s still a very entertaining movie thanks to the silliness of the subject matter.

A couple of shady business men are in cahoots with a local man who is digging up corpses that are then fed into a grinder machine turning the body into pulp. This stuff is then canned & sent out to shops for unwitting cat owners to buy.

The taste of human flesh sends the kitties into a wild rage attacking their owners hungry for more. It has to be noted how unthreatening these cat attacks are, the cats are pretty tame & seem more shocked then anything! Not that there is actually much in the way of attacks as this a movie based more around the supply of the bodies & the character Landau (one of the Lotus cat food owners) who becomes more & more bloodthirsty as the movie goes on.

Greed is the name of the game & there seems to be a lot of money in grinding up bodies for cat food. Landau & his partner are seemingly untouchable until a local doctor & his girlfriend start investigating the cat attacks. These two are something…looking like they’ve just stepped out of a 70’s porno & never seeming more than mildly concerned about the events that are occurring.

The acting is pretty sub-standard throughout & the films low quality makes hearing lines difficult at times. A great source of amusement beside the cat attacks has to be the constant outfit changes as few scenes go by without some sort of new clothes on show. That is where the budget seems to have gone!

Being a movie from the 1970’s we have heroic men & women who scream far too much. Our one female lead is just here for eye-candy, showing of her assets while not putting up a struggle at all. During a struggle between Landau & his partner at the end she manages to get free but still elects to stand in one spot screaming rather than running up the stairs. It’s the kind of role you could only get away with during this era.

Disappointingly though the film is quite light on gore with bodies being feed into the grinder like putty & the only shot being an over-used view of sloppy meat pouring into a bucket.

By any standard The Corpse Grinders is a bad movie but there is something about it that just compels to you keep watching even if it doesn’t live up to the subject matter.

They don’t make them like this anymore…that’s for damn sure!