Corpse Grinders 3 (2012)
CORPSE GRINDERS 3
WRITER: Marc Gras and Manolito Motosierra
DIRECTOR: Manolito Motosierra
STARRING: Pedro Garcia Oliva as Arnie
Ricardo Pastor as Ted
Manuel Rodriguez as Bill
Tam Sempre Miro as Grizzly
Garrick Tuitt as Mr. Morris
John Martino as Mr. Gualtieri
QUICK CUT: Ugh. The Lotus Cat Food Company is back again, and once more they can't seem to keep their company under control and stop their employees from grinding up corpses to put in their cat food. Seriously guys, you gotta work on this! Once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern!
THE MORGUE
Arnie - Our...our hero. He's a whiny, shrill dude who just wants to find out why cats keep attacking people, and take care of his aging mother.
Bill and Ted - This movie's Landau and Maltby. They're not too bright, they're the dudes running the machines, and one of them is mysteriously missing an eye for no apparent reason aside from being disguisting. They're also the closest thing we get to bad guys.
Mr. Grizzly - The owner of the factory where Lotus sets up shop, and before they even arrive in town with their corpse grinding machine, the cat food tycoon is already problematic in his health code violations. He cuts more corners than paper makers aboard the Battlestar Galactica.
Mr. Morris - The representative from Lotus who buys the factory from Grizzly, and he's a slick American type who's just trying to make a buck by outsourcing Lotus's manufacturing to a foreign country with cheap labour.
This is my own personal Inception-like level of Hell.
THE GUTS: Oh good gods. A third Corpse Grinders movie. They made a third one. Three of them. Some of the earliest reviews on Trisk, and some of the worst movies. My nemesis has at long last returned, and it just so happens that this is the anniversary of the original reviews for CG1 and CG2. Maybe we will at last figure out what happened with the cat aliens and Ted V. Mikels!!
...Or not, as we kick things off in possibly the worst way imaginable; with some dude sitting and watching the original Corpse Grinders movie. If that doesn't drive him to homicide, I dunno what will. That, and you would think he'd be clued in on the plot of what's about to go down, wouldn't you?
And sure enough, it's not long before his cat is being fed by his mother. Would it be considered nitpicking to have them opening up a can of cat food, and pouring out dry food? Hey, I own cats, I know what comes in the cans, and it ain't that. But this will be the smallest offense of this movie.
This is all before I even get to the wince-worthy 'acting' of the movie, already evident in the first three minutes. The writhing cat puppet squealing away after eating the wrong food is a better actor. Strap yourselves in, I think this is going to be a rough ride.
We jump from poor Mr. Beasley being killed, to two guys bashing away at meat to...tenderise it? Cut it up? I don't think they even know. But I *swear* if these two pigfuckers are named Maltby and Landau, I am turning this movie around and going home.
This cat wouldn't 'voom!' if I put four thousand volts through it!
Fortunately, the plot trucks along with Mr. Beasley's owner showing up to yell at someone from the cat food company, and he's not going to take it as a case of rabies.
The movie jumps right from the guy swinging a dead cat around to saying there's a solution to everyone's problems, that being the place getting shut down immediately. That was awfully quick, and the owner agreed to it pretty easily!
Fortunately for NotLandau and NotMaltby, the owner lets the pair of goons stay in the now-abandoned building, at least until he sells it off. And the terrible ADR is killing me slowly.
Caught between a rock and a bad movie.
After the long-overdue credits, we dive right into a funeral, and come on. We gotta have someone die outside the movie? Now you're just teasing me, movie. ANYways, one of the butchers from earlier, Ted, shows up to score some weed from the gravedigger, because you gotta have the gravedigger in these movies.
But it's a good thing for Bill and Ted (Nope, not gonna do it, WAY too easy, folks), that Mr. Grizzly manages to sell the old cat food place to a new owner, Mr. Morris. And he plans to turn it into...a cat food factory! Because that worked so well before!
Anyways, he announces they will be renaming the place to the Lotus Cat Food company, and that his family has owned the company which has a proud and long tradition of making wonderful cat food for over seven decades! Well... Minus those two events with food made from dead people, right?
To make things even better, Morris will help Bill and Ted begin their excellent adventure with some new, high tech equipment...which they immediately break.
These corpse grinding machines are the latest state of the art.
While the town celebrates the influx of American dollars, Bill and Ted get yelled at by another tennant of the cat food factory (?!) because they've been banging away on the machine all night long trying to fix what they broke off. And she is promptly walked into the machine. Seriously, it's a very gentle nudge backwards, guiding her to the conveyor belt. It's almost like she wanted to go!
Ted rushes to tell Mr. Grizzly and when the boss arrives on the scene, they see a cat gobbling away at the remains of Mrs. Livingstone. Grizzly has a brainstorm, and the name Lotus Cat Food must be cursed. Not even a day of being in operation and already they have a ground up corpse and this being seen as a business goldmine.
Dear Lotus Cat Food, whenever you open a new business, be sure to stipulate to all employees that there will be NO corpse grinding, and to report all accidental corpse grinding incidents to their superiors immediately! In addition, be on the lookout, because there will be people constantly attempting to grind themselves up!
So, as you can imagine, Bill and Ted go off to find more bodies on their boss's orders, and they are not even dicking around with the "wait, let's be slightly moral and get ALREADY dead bodies!" first. Nope, they jump straight past that and grab a poor living girl right off the empty streets.
The plot thinnens when we find out that they grabbed the local preacher's niece, and toss her into the machine, despite Grizzly freaking out and wondering about what to do. I dunno, why not just let her go? I mean, if you NEED a body, and I reluctantly concede that point for plot, then you could just dump her in the park and find someone ELSE to kill that you don't know... Oh, and the whole preacher plotline ends up going nowhere.
I don't get paid enough for this!
We briefly wander back to our friend from the start of the film, buying more cat food, and feeding it to his NEW cat, again called Mr. Beasley! Oh, come on. That is just ASKING for trouble. You don't name your boat, Titanic II!
Can we just stop and appreciate the movie actually giving a montage of cat food being made? And I feel like I should complain about the health issues around the cat food being spat out onto the floor, but hey, it's human remains, so I guess that ship sailed decades ago.
Morris takes a meeting with Grizzly and states these are the best returns the company has had in 30 years! Yeah, since the last people grinding incident, you goober!
He's obviously the mayor, you can tell by the sash. What is this, Springfield?!
After paying off the greedy mayor, we jump to a random woman feeding her cats you know what, and then getting pounced on and devoured in addition to their abnormal food. See, this is what the movies always needed more of. It's always been the promise, but never delivered. Yay!
Mr. Beasley briefly gets in on the attacking fun, before we see Mr. Morris getting a call from his boss who isn't happy about all the money he's spending, and he wants samples of the new product. Dude, it's the same as the old product. How can Lotus still be in business??
Back at the factory, Ted is scooping food into cans for packaging...you know, if there's one thing these movies have taught me, it is that NO ONE involved in making them has any idea how cat food is made, processed, or packaged. Can you imagine some national food chain trying to make cat food with one machine, run by two guys, scooping the slop up by hand into each single can? Yeah, no.
Wait, if the blades are up THERE, and the conveyor is down THERE...how does anyone get sliced up?
Over in the adventures of Mr. Beasley, his owner is conducting experiments with a stray, and trying to give it some of the Lotus food, which immediately turns it into a crazy maniac cat. And what ensues is the most hilarious part so far in this movie, as he swings around the dead cat puppet, splatting it on the walls, and eventually shoving it into a microwave before he can become the next victim.
Meanwhile, Ted has been given his orders to make the food more addictive, so he of course visits the gravedigger. Who of course has a magic potion. Which is of course made from dead people. Which is probably the least crazy thing in the movie.
Light as a kitten, stiff as a board.
Mr. Beasley's owner, whom we now learn is ALSO named Mr. Beasley...carrying on a proud tradition of the Corpse Grinders movies being so terrible at naming characters, every name is used at least twice...heads to the vet with the microwaved cat to have it looked at.
After another random scene of cat violence, we jump back to the vet telling Beasley that he didn't find poison in the dead cat, but he did find human remains. I bet he also found whatever leftovers were also caked on the inside the microwave that he had to scrape off to get the cat out...
Back at Lotus, they're busy setting up for the cat fair thing they keep talking about and I'm not caring about, and the mayor stops by once again to shake them down for even more money. Yeah, the 'hey, it'll be cheap to open up a branch overseas!' plan is faililng miserably.
Hey, wait! That's a different mayor!!
Grizzly heads down to yell at his workers to make more food, who have been demanding uniforms, which he never actually ordered. Yes, it's a thrilling uniform subplot! Yay! Fortunately, this one ends with Grizzly being tossed into the machine for making Bill angry. Go Bill! Be your own boss!
Seriously though, this is the main problem with this plot. Everyone is greedy, everyone wants more food, everyone is willing to do anything to get it, so eventually someone is going to yell and get fed to the machine to shut them up. And not a single person goes, hey! Maybe we shouldn't encourage murder and then anger employees!
Beasley shows up claiming to be a health inspector, and you almost think he's gonna go down the chute, and that would have almost been a welcome twist. But he sees a severed head just laying around and runs away, saying he'll be back later to inspect their raw materials when a new supply comes in. So close to being the new supply, dude...
He runs straight to the police, who are in utter disbelief that the famous cat food company uses human remains in their food. Dude, do you know WHY the Lotus brand is famous?? Google it!
Diogenes searching for an honest cat food maker.
After rushing to a crime scene with another cat attack, Beasley tries to sneak into the factory, but gets interrupted by a random woman looking for her cat. And they start flirting. We're in the final fifteen minutes, this is a bit late for a romantic subplot with an all-new character, yes?
But the pair stops searching, because finding her cat, and evidence of murder just isn't that important than flirting and sex. The first I can see, but I supposed Beasley is more interested in losing his virginity.
The next day is the big cat fair whatever, and it's expectedly laughable on this movie's budget, with like 12 people milling about a table you'd find at a church function. Morris comes asking about Mr. Grizzly and brushes it off as fine and okay when Bill and Ted don't know where he went. Next in the door is the detective, looking for answers of his own.
And he asks the most important one, "Don't you think it's a little dirty to have cats running around here?" Dude, DUDE if you only knew. The cats scampering around the food is the least of the troubles here. And that's even before getting to corpses.
Outside, a cat starts attacking people just as the cop finds human remains laying around, and Morris tries to get everyone outisde. Not sure if he wants to help, or if it's a situation of, "Come quick and look at this!!"
I got a cat on a stick, yay!
Chaos ensues at the fair, and the machine starts to overload, just as Morris gets another call from his boss. He's too busy checking out the machine though, as SOMEthing crawls out of it and barfs all over him. Be a shame if we actually knew what was going on.
...And then it randomly becomes a biker movie?! That's a random shift. I mean, sure, slightly less so with the girl that dragged off Beasley, but this is still pretty sudden.
So the movie climaxes with a chaotic murderous cat fair being interrupted by a biker gang, a cop, and a gigantic hideous monster? I'll give the movie credit for weirdness and balls on this turn of events.
I would not have called cats vs. bikers as being this movie's endgame.
Beasley and his gal rush into the building, to either find her cat or human remains, I dunno at this point. Instead they find a humanoid catman in a suit. ...Again, I did not see that one coming. Huh.
Another of the bikers run in to fight the thing off so the two can escape, just as Bill and Ted run off into the sunset starting their bogus journey. Are we supposed to accept Beasley as the hero of the movie? He didn't really do anything.
The two go their seperate ways as the bikers ride off and uh...did they win, are they running? Are we supposed to assume that they stopped all the cats off camera? Including the catman? What was that? What even is the plot of this movie?! Why did whatever was going on just stop? Why movie, why??
And poor Mr. Beasley doesn't even get the girl, as she drives off with the bikers!
The movie crashes into a conclusion of anticlimactic whatness, as the cops are cleaning up the crime scene after everything has gone down, and the detective heads upstairs to investigate some noises just to get sucked into a cupboard and killed.
...The hell?
AUTOPSY REPORT
Video: This movie commits one of my cardinal sins, and that is crushing down a 16:9 presentation into a 4:3 format. There really is little to no excuse for this these days. If you have it in widescreen, just PUT IT IN WIDESCREEN. Your film will look SO much better, and will require SO much less processing and upscaling and zooming, which only makes things worse! But it could still look worse, and aside from some scenes being overly dank, I can at least live with it.
Audio: Thoroughly average.
Sound Bite: "Do you think what we're doing is right?" Ted, asking the important questions
Body Count
1 - I am tentatively counting Mr. Beasley's death three minutes into the movie from tainted cat food.
2 - 20 minutes in, and Mrs. Livingstone isn't so much living anymore after being walked calmly into the machine.
3 - Poor Sophia is the next to become cat food.
4 - A random victim goes down the grinder chute during a montage. The worst way to go.
5 - And she wasn't the only one, a dude gets shoved into the machine during the same montage.
6 - A bunch of cats kill their owner after getting the taste for human flesh.
7 - Random dude gets dragged under the bed by a tiny cat and sliced up.
8 - Mr. Grizzly gets fed to the grinder when he upsets his workers.
9 - The mayor gets dragged off and explodes, so I'm guessing he died too.
10 - The detective is finished off by an unseen thing in a closet.
And any number of other cats and people at the fair on top of those, surely.
Best Corpse: Ugh, no death really stands out, but at least we get to see Sophia being stalked by Bill and Ted, grabbed, and fed into the machine, and not as a sidenote to a montage, so yeah.
Blood Type - D: Well, they try. They do some cheesy CG blood, but we don't see much else besides.
Sex Appeal: Well, the movie sure has a lot of pussies in it, but that's just a cheap gag, isn't it?
Drink Up! Every time the mayor shows up to get more money out of Morris.
Movie Review: Argle. It's no surprise that this is a terrible movie. The plot clunks along and doesn't really do much to build character or suspense or mystery. And they've done this twice before already. And the movie doesn't really end as it more...stops. Which seems to happen a lot. Things are even worse here, because the only reason the movie ends is because people run away, and a few danglers are left hanging wide open. On the upside, it is actually a more coherent plot and less WTFery than CG2, and stays mostly grounded in a semblence of reality. Still. It's Corpse Grinders. It's silly. It's vapid. Two out of five cans from the Lotus cupboard.
Entertainment Value: And yet...there's always a joy lurking in Ted V. Mikels films. They're bad, they're silly, and they KNOW IT. They're having fun, they're goofing around. It's still crazy that things like this get made, but here we are. But it is lacking the pure crazy of cat aliens running around, but it makes up for it with the over the top accents that sound like they're being done as jokes by Americans, but are SO not. Also, this movie DOES deliver on something I always felt the first two lacked; cats actually going on minor rampages. The other two had a cat kill here and there, but we get quite a few this time out, and an all out catfight at the end, even if most of that happens off screen. They still TRIED. I don't love this movie in the weird way I love the first one in its quaint 70s charm, but I also don't loathe it with the headscratching bizarreness of the second. However, that bizarreness is part of that OWN film's charms. CG3 manages to be watching and over the top silly in its way, and is probably a better story than the second one, but misses out on how often you stare at the screen shouting, WHAT?! I could sit here all day going back and forth on which is better, so I'll just wrap up and say we've got a three out of five different mayors.
