Elwood’s bad teeth -- that’s why his Paw wouldn’t get him those candy bars he always asked for – banality arriving like barbed wire on softened flesh, cutting deeply through an electrically charged scene. Two men, a father and a son, take time out from hunting a group of teens to discuss why they never got their kin (now laying in the woods hacked to pieces) the chocolate bars he always asked for. The father levies the vitriol coming his way from his oldest, suggesting that the sweets would have only exasperated his son’s already cavity damaged teeth. Paw is leaving something out, specifically that his own greed was a factor contributing to his decision not to buy the sweets, but that doesn’t really matter in the face of his dead son. The sense of shame and sadness is thick between these two men. Without breaking into one of those “I shoulda been a better father to you two boys,” which wouldn’t have been a surprise either, Paw straightens up, gathers his bearings, and then begins laying out his plan to kill those he feels responsible for his son’s death. His other son, the oldest, is readily on board. This isn’t about gathering meat to sell to the local butcher, this is about avenging one of their own. This is about family.

There’s no beating around the bush here, “Lunch Meat” is yet another in an endless string of cheap “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” knockoffs. However, when it's all said and done, this one isn't half bad... maybe even ranking alongside Jon McBride's "Cannibal Campout" and Rob Schmidt's "Wrong Turn" as one of the best. By humanizing the film’s central baddies, one time auteur Kirk Alex treks a different path than most other post-Chainsaw Massacre clones. Alex seems to have used Hooper’s film as a template for his own twisted imaginings of a family unit gone cannibal, however instead of pushing too far one way, he pushes in the opposite direction, and the end result is somewhat gratifying from a genre hound’s perspective.

Ever since Hooper’s cult film headlined drive-ins in 1973 to surprising success, “cannibal hillbilly” flicks, often following a similar monotonous modus operandi, began to saturate the market eventually peaking in the late 1980s. You know the story; a group of analogous teens find themselves stalled out in some off-the-beaten-path rural area and after some bickering, they make their way to a local farmhouse only to discover the family residing there are a bunch of cannibals. The quandary for most filmmakers looking to cash in on this lucrative subgenre was how to redress the existing recipe, and give it their own unique flavour. Sadly, many of them failed simply because they were unable to grasp what made Hooper’s film chug-a-chug along so successfully. Underneath all the hazy insanity, intense creepy atmosphere and implied gore was an interesting and constantly developing chronicle of an isolated, anarchistic, melancholy family deprived of standard educational and moralistic bearings – living in a sort of heightened primal state, although not so much that they weren’t able to maintain at least a few of the cultural mores (the way they gather around a table with family to eat, for instance). Meat (rather, humans) was their essential commodity.

Kirk Alex, for all of his tedious adherence to Hooper’s original idea, clearly understood what worked and designed his script accordingly. In an unexpected move, Alex steers his focus away from the bland eye-candy of the cute twenty-something teens and instead chooses to focus on the fecal-decked rooster’s cage – the family. There’s more to this household than a desire to eat and sell human flesh, something that immediately sets it apart from other films of this ilk. Like most families, they have their own set of domestic problems (money isn’t good, there’s the one kid’s unchecked dental issues, and the other’s lingering untreated autism) something that feels strangely universal about these folks. Elwood (a carbon copy of Edwin Neal’s character nearly down to his choice of attire), for instance, loves to dine on chocolate bars but his ‘Paw’ (sic), played by crotchety actor Elroy Wiese, resists citing Elwood’s ‘bad teeth’ and their lack of money. His older and more reliable brother Harley (Robert Oland), looking like an unwashed Barry Gibb, is in charge of running into town in the family’s yellow pick-up to sell the chicken-meat they harvest to a local butcher, quietly pocketing some of the money for himself. The third brother Benny, an autistic 300-pound brute with the mental capacity of a five year old, is treated more like a pet than a family member, including the occasional beating when he accidentally gets free of his leash. Even though they quarrel, they are family and that translates well enough that we comprehend their dilemma when they try to figure out new ways of making money. Harley has an idea, and it involves a group of teens on their way to Mount Edgar that he and Elwood encountered at a local burger pit in town.

By contrast, the proverbial group of meat-grinder fodder, six high school seniors, lead by a soon-to-be hardcore porn starlet Ashlyn Gere (here called Kim McKamy), are so one-note and nondescript, that most audience members will be irritated by them even before they reach the first chorus of “Row, row, row your boat…” about ten minutes into the movie. The schematics for a character (or characters) are there but they never fully materialize – keeping to the basics; this kid is rich, this girl likes that guy etc… In the end, these folks are nothing more than fodder for a barely ‘there’ narrative and we know this. Snobbish rich kid Cary (Rick Lorentz) is a borderline interesting character -- segueing from a prickly jerk early on into an uneasy hero in the film’s latter half.

The anticipated car stall scene kicks in about thirty minutes after the opening credits, and inevitably forces the filmmaker’s hand creatively, as it ramps up to an exciting game of hide and seek through an endless expanse thickly wooded rural terrain. Rick Neigher’s marvellous synthesized-score joined with Al Goodrum’s flawless hand-held cinematography, really helps to pump up what could have been a boring sixty minutes of people running aimlessly through the forest. Each member of the family (minus Benny) picks a couple and before you can say Irving Pichel, the hunt is on. Spicing up the festivities is the occasional stop and kill, which shows that despite cultural and class divergence, in the end, we’re all human and when it comes down to pure survival, we’re all fair game. Equally matched the good guys and the bad guys give as much as they get, and the losses are felt on both sides.

Kim McKamy (1986's "Dreamaniac") finds herself in the unglamorous position of having to crawl back and forth underneath a parked truck as Elroy Wiese darts around the vehicle trying to snag her. This agonizingly drawn out sequence helps bring the film full circle as the attention is turned back towards the family and McKamy gets a front row seat as ‘the family’ already in meltdown mode completely self destructs. To say the ending was a surprise would be a bit of an understatement, although in hindsight, it was building towards something explosive. "Lunch Meat" is nearly impossible to find given that it has yet to receive a full DVD re-release however there are a number of online sources that offer the film namely Cultra Rare Videos and Stumpy Disks.

To see more images from "Lunch Meat" go here