Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1983)
"Please do not disturb Evelyn. She already is."
Plot
After several years in an insane asylum, Evelyn Chambers is finally released and goes back to running the Mountaintop Motel. She kills a young child during a fit of anger and this starts her descent back into madness, which is bad news for the other guests staying at the motel.
It's been a while since I've sat down to watch a good ol' 80s slasher film that I hadn't seen yet and stumbled upon this when browsing through Wikipedia (damn that site is a gold mine). Maybe I wish I'd never bothered. It was actually made in 1983 but sat getting dusty on some shelf somewhere before the slasher craze really hit it big. Mountaintop Motel Massacre is arguably Psycho for the 80s slasher generation only with a barking mad old lady in the place of Norman Bates. She hears voices from her dead daughter and blames the guests for her daughter's demise. This is certainly not Hitchcock, nor would the great director have ever envisioned his classic to have inspired such drivel. Maybe he would have approved of the catchy tagline, one of the best of the 80s horror genre.
Technically appalling, laughably acted and with a snail's pace, it's a good hour before the batty woman kills the first guest. It does pick up at this point although the preceding fifty minutes are a bit of a slog to get through. As expected the opening introduces us to the character of Evelyn and throws in a bit of back story. After all, what would a slasher flick be without a kill in the opening ten minutes? The good thing with Mountaintop Motel Massacre is that it doesn't hide who the killer is from the get-go so there's no red herrings, no attempts to throw a few curve balls to the audience and just a focus on making this main character such a crazy, swivel-eyed loon. I'm not sure whether the young girl she kills is supposed to be her granddaughter or just some random guest but either way it doesn't really matter as its pointless filler - Evelyn doesn't get arrested, the girl is forgotten about and life goes on. We're then introduced to the guests who all arrive at the motel including a handyman, an alcoholic reverend, a couple on their honeymoon and an advertising executive who picks up two hitchhikers and pretends to be a big shot record producer to get them into the sack. The characters are all fleshed out, if badly acted, and they are at least written with a sense of intelligence (i.e. they prefer keeping safety in numbers and not going to investigate things on their own). Unfortunately the characters are all we get and things slowly, and I mean slowly, plod along for ages. They talk to each other. They drive around and arrive at the motel. They meet the other guests.
You quickly get the feeling that the script has been hastily compiled based upon the title of the film and the nifty tagline, with the amount of stalling really keeping Mountaintop Motel Massacre from getting to the only reason why people would tune in for this - the actual massacre. The kills, when they do eventually take place, are unremarkable and weapon of choice is a scythe. Ketchup and corn syrup is the order of the day although the film isn't overly bloody. However, the old lady has a great habit of using tunnels underneath the motel to get into each of the separate rooms. This leads to plenty of moments of floor tiles slowly lifting in the dark to reveal the candlelit silhouette of the old lady with scythe in hand. It's quite a novel and effective way to get around each of the locked rooms and is well used. However, I can't for one moment think of how long it would take for me to notice the tiles lifting up next to me whilst sitting on the toilet - it takes one guys ages before he sees the floor tile nearly mid-air!
Anna Chappell gives a committed performance as Evelyn, this being one of her only two acting credits and it's not hard to see why. The character is a bit thinly-written but doesn't succumb to some quick signposts to show she's going crazy; this is a reasonably plausible descent into madness. Some may find the idea of a little old woman becoming the next Michael Myers a little far-fetched but to it's credit, Mountaintop Motel Massacre does at least attempt to paint her as a threat, notably for the sneaky way she gets around the motel. The old lady also has a habit of putting animals and insects into the rooms to spook the guests before she kills them later. For me, it was another pointless waste of good slashing time. She should have been chopping up a few more characters instead of wasting her time tipping cockroaches into bedrooms. If I was staying in a hotel that was suddenly infested with bugs or rats, I'd be straight out of the door - it's like she's giving the characters a chance to escape before they resign themselves to their fates and staying put. Most of the rest of the cast only seem to have one or two credits to their name as well so it's not like this was a career breakthrough.
Final Verdict
Mountaintop Motel Massacre is hardly one of the decade's worst slasher films but it's clear that it was a regionally-made movie which was given a bigger platform than it deserved. If you're ticking off the list of every 80s slasher, then this one will be a compulsory watch but if you're just an average horror fan looking to dabble into this sub-genre, there are far more thrilling and better-made films out there.
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Mountaintop Motel Massacre Director(s): Jim McCullough Sr. Writer(s): Jim McCullough Sr. Actor(s): Anna Chappell, Bill Thurman, Will Mitchel, Virginia Loridans, Major Brock, James Bradford, Amy Hill Duration: 95 mins |  |
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