While I wasn't initially aware of Ed Wood being involved in this (he apparently took over the directing duties and is credited with an alias), the staggering ineptitude of Meatcleaver Massacre soon gave me a clue to his involvement. Not that I am a hater of Wood. Indeed, many of his clumsy failures have a charm lacking from a selection of more polished mainstream productions I could name, but it would be disingenuous to try and hail him as some kind of misunderstood great. An important part of cinema history, yes. A misunderstood genius, I think not.
Meatcleaver Massacre contains neither a meatcleaver nor a massacre, as far as I could tell anyway (it's not the sharpest picture quality I've ever seen). It instead contains a messy and tame horror film that in no way lives up to the promise of the title. There's also some footage of Christopher Lee bookending the film (and I encourage you all to investigate how that happened to end up there) with some dialogue that attempts to add some weight to the nonsense you're about to watch. The silly plot has Professor Cantrell (James Habif) left paraplegic and comatose after a group of abusive thugs break into his home and kill his family. That doesn't mean that Cantrell is powerless though. His years of studying the occult mean that he can still find a way to get revenge on the criminals.
Keith Burns and Ray Atherton are the two people credited with writing this, but it's not something that most people would put on their C.V. The dialogue is dire, there's no tension, and most of the characters blend into one another. There's the Professor, there's the detective investigating the situation (played by J. Arthur Craig), and there are the corpses-to-be.
If the writing and direction are poor, the acting generally matches them. There's nobody here (Lee aside) who you could imagine one day making their way through some big award campaign. I've seen a hell of a lot worse though, especially while sitting through many SOV and/or microbudget horror movies. Larry Justin plays the ringleader of the reprobates, and isn't actually terrible. He just cannot do anything with the material to make it better.
There's not much else to say about this. It runs for 85 minutes, but viewers spend 8 of those minutes being spoken to by Christopher Lee, and there are no depths to explore and examine. The fact that it has been given a limited release on Blu-ray by a couple of different companies (Shout! Factory in the USA, 101 Films here in the UK), while I still eagerly await a collector's edition release of Screamtime, is just downright perverse.
2/10
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