Motel Hell

Farmer Vincent and his sister run a motel and a smokehouse whose famous fritters are made from travellers they capture, sever the vocal cords of, and bury alive in a garden to fatten before slaughter.

Kevin Connor made a horror comedy that plays it almost entirely straight-faced, which is why it works: Vincent, played by Rory Calhoun, is a genial, God-fearing craftsman who sees no contradiction between his faith and his product, and the satire of wholesome rural America is sharp.

The image of a garden of buried human heads, hooded and grunting, is one of the great absurd-horror visions of the era.

The chainsaw duel finale, with Vincent in a giant pig's head, is the payoff.

It flopped, was reappraised as a satire that its contemporaries took too literally, and it is a clear ancestor of the Troma sensibility done with more skill.