by Matthew Crump, Staff Writer

“It takes all types of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters!”

There’s nothing like a good slasher. Except a bad slasher— especially when it knows it’s bad. It was sometime in high school when I picked up a hankering for horror movies. I started staying up late at my grandma’s house in her “big room”— with the big TV to match— exploring the dark corners of the genre and growing obsessed with the catharsis they provided me. I tried sharing my newfound love with my friends, but they’d usually run off from Granny Crump’s house screaming.

By the time I was in college, I’d found the company I wanted to keep and my relationship with horror had progressed to throwing on throwaway slashers before bed to fall asleep. Later, after I learned what an Adverse Childhood Experiences score was (not to brag, but mine is off the charts) I read a study that helped me put words to why I gravitated so much to the guts and gore. As it turns out, a love of horror films is often a creative way for our brains to deal with unresolved trauma in a safe, controlled environment. Go figure.

The two paragraphs you just read took me about a decade to figure out. In the process of this long-form therapy, I’ve put a lot of folks through a LOT of shitty, scary movies. There’s one friend though who has easily surpassed all the rest on her big room punch card. Sarah and I first met in after-school daycare but it wasn’t until we were a couple of teenage dirtbags that we realized we shared an affinity for the macabre.

The first screening I remember was The Exorcist. She’d driven me home after marching band practice and we ended up in the basement crowded around a box TV. I remember being more disgusted by the way she dipped her chips in ketchup than anything I saw spewing out of Regan’s mouth (eventually I learned to find this snack habit endearing).

Anyone who’s ever left their hometown knows the inevitable drift apart from their high school buddies. Not with Sarah. Just as my head would stop spinning from another semester, my door would be axed down and through the splintered wood I’d see her chip-eating grin beaming on the other side. She even made the effort to visit me in my 4x4 dorm room, something that speaks volumes to me now as I look back.

It was during that first summer home from college that I wrote my vows to my favorite film genre in the form of a 20-page watchlist still buried somewhere in my Google Docs. Sarah saw this and didn’t even blink at the challenge. Pretty soon we established a rhythm: she would pick me up from a late-night shift at the local pizza parlor, we’d pull in across the street at the Flick Video, screech through a drive thru, take our movie rentals, and Cook Out trays home and double-feature on my grandma’s Toshiba (no, this wasn’t 1985. It was 2015 and I’ll believe in physical media until the day I die).

This continued for the next couple of summers as we plowed through dozens and dozens of DVDs. I’ll be honest, a lot of what we watched was so bottom of the barrel that we somehow unlocked another secret compartment to the barrel. Sometimes that was cool, like discovering Art the Clown and friending him on Facebook about a year before Terrifer ever hit theaters. Most times though, it would end in a literal snoozefest where I would have to wake Sarah up and perform a series of cognitive tests until she proved she was lucid enough to drive home.

It was sometime during these late-night watch parties while I was home from college that we discovered the film Motel Hell. It was so bonkers that I started questioning if I was still high off pizza fumes. I can’t speak for Sarah, but I remember being immediately enamored.

The plot follows a multifaceted farmer/butcher/motel owner named Vincent and his cooped-up sister/disgraced doctor named Ida. These two take in a blonde bombshell who just so happens to be the sole survivor of a carefully orchestrated motorcycle crash. When blondie starts to catch feelings for her geriatric savior, it becomes increasingly difficult for the siblings to hide their demented garden and cannibalistic jerky.

Maybe it was just because we’d been stuck in a B-movie rut and I was desperate for some good fucking food, but Farmer Vincent and his $2.95 sampler was better than any Cook Out tray combo that summer. Rewatching it for this article, I still stand by it— and this time I wasn’t delirious from an 8-hour shift of slinging slices! 

It’s the kind of black comedy-horror that Sarah and I love. Many of its critics fault it for the derivative themes of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (another early watch in our friendship): an unfair comparison that likely only happened because of Hooper's initial involvement in Motel Hell. When Universal Studios pulled the plug on this meat grinder, Hooper left the butcher shop and the sausage almost wasn’t made, that is until a miniscule production company swept in and gave Kevin Connor the cleaver.

Under new direction, it was Connor who advocated for the Jaffe Brothers to shift the tone of their script to something sillier and less gruesome. Certainly, this was for the dual purpose of short-cutting budget constraints while also shifting the expectation for the type of horror movie it could be. What resulted was the kind of campy tone that hadn’t been experimented with since 1975’s Rocky Horror Picture Show. Which— yep, you guessed it— Sarah and I have seen together on multiple occasions.

While this didn’t bode well for Motel Hell when it was released in 1980, it was a smash hit in Granny Crump’s Big Room™ 35 years later. The neverending parade of kooky characters lit up my and Sarah’s senses: a communist stoner rocker, BDSM swingers, The Shining twin knockoffs and famed American DJ, Wolfman Jack– just to name a few. But by far the most iconic of the idiocracy was the farmer’s sister, Ida.

When Nancy Parsons first appears on screen with her hair in pigtails wearing a sprinkle-print muumuu, you can tell she knows exactly what kind of movie she’s in. The frenetic chemistry she shares with her on-screen brother, the cowboy-turned-murderer Rory Calhoun, is something to be marveled at. Parsons isn’t afraid to hum along cheerily, throw a kissy face toward the camera or deliver her catchphrase “okey-dokey!” amidst the literal buckets of gore. This commitment to crazed camp is a rare gift among actors, and something I’ve only witnessed on-screen a handful of times. 

However, off-screen I can draw a direct line to the characters Sarah plays at our favorite hometown haunt— and I don’t mean that figuratively. While I was off galavanting at college, Sarah debuted Cannibelle the Clown at Lake Hickory Haunts. 

I can still remember the overwhelming pride I felt the first time I saw her in action. Not just for her acting, but for the fact that I’d only ever seen her let loose and have fun like that in our private moments together. Knowing that we share much of the same anxieties, it inspired me to see her let go of that and gave me hope I might do the same in my life. Seeing her create the unfettered joy that gives way when the fear passes— that feeling I’m constantly chasing— it’s the same kind of infectious glee that Parsons captures in Motel Hell, and it’s one of the many reasons that I love them both. 

Ida isn’t the only source of ridiculousness in the movie (just my favorite). Another huge selling point is Farmer Vincent’s garden, which is where he and his sister do the majority of their conniving. When a snooping health inspector uncovers the motorcyclist buried up to his slashed throat in one of the garden plots, he soon meets the same fate. But here’s the kicker: they’re still alive. Their vocal chords have just been cut so they can’t scream. As the viewers, we get to watch many more victims of roadside crashes join the silent chorus.

We also get to bear witness to Ida’s iffy medical knowledge and Vincent’s warped sense of ethics, providing such proselytic gems as: 

“Oh, sometimes I wonder about the karmic implications of these acts. I can no more take credit for the good we’ve done here tonight than if that great pilot in the sky blessed each of them with a bolt of lightning through their hearts.” 

WHAT?! It’s nonsensical lines like these where Motel Hell really shines. I promise it’ll be responsible for more than a few unexpected guffaws. So many outrageous shenanigans take place in the garden that you honestly will forget there’s a motel involved at all. 

This lack of focus simultaneously contributes to the movie’s charms and its pitfalls. Other parts that take me out of the fun are murky abusive dynamics between the characters (the ones lucky enough to still be above ground), as well as the blondie who definitely has a name but it isn’t worth remembering because she’s more a caricature of a woman than anything else.

Even so, I want to excuse these faults because of the uncharted territory black comedies were in at the time, seeming to not hit their stride until later in the decade. Motel Hell’s camp-horror aesthetic would eventually get refined and refocused by none other than Tobe Hooper with his follow-up, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Its impact seems to have widened the market for this niche sub-genre, ushering in films like Beetlejuice and Evil Dead 2. 

Meanwhile, Farmer Vincent, all dressed up in a pig mask with his chainsaw ready to go, is left to decay at the bottom of the bargain bin. Even horror aficionados like Sarah and myself long miscredited piggy sadism to the Saw franchise (that one was a slog to get through). If you can still believe it, these are the kind of movies that I go to for feeling safe. I used to think I did this for psychological safety, and maybe that’s still part of it. Looking back now though, I wonder if the reason I was doing it was because Sarah was the one who made me feel safe and secure. 

These days I’m far away in Philly and, instead of slinging slices, I’m slinging tapes into my VHS player. Meanwhile, Sarah has recently made a much-anticipated return to the haunt scene, this time in her new role as a crazed dental assistant named Nova Kaine. A lot has changed in our lives over the years, but she’s still there striking fear/fun into folks' hearts and here I am still proselytizing forgotten slasher flicks. A friendship that runs this deep makes me eternally grateful to have found the Ida to my Vincent.