The next time you decide to spend the night at one of those locally owned motels situated suspiciously in the middle of nowhere, be sure to check your room for the following items: poisonous snakes, flesh-eating rats, and an elaborate tunnel system created by the psychotic old lady who runs the joint. If your room contains one or more of the aforementioned items, run frantically through the surrounding woods until you stumble across someone who can help you locate the nearest redneck township. Heed my words, weary travelers!
The obscure 1986 genre travelogue Mountaintop Motel Massacre is yet another putrid blemish on the mom & pop lodging industry, portraying these unfortunate business people as impossibly disturbed individuals with an insatiable lust for murder, madness, and mayhem. Using Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Psycho as a guideline, director Jim McCullough spreads his own unique hillbilly butter all over this painfully familiar slice of generic white bread. It's not the finest slab of cinema you'll ever pay money to witness, mind you, but it does manage to provide a rainy evening's worth of entertainment if you can overlook a set of wonky hand-crafted flaws.
After accidentally filleting her daughter for stupidly experimenting with the dark arts, Mountaintop Motel manager Evelyn Chambers slowly begins to lose what's left of her deranged little mind. To help soothe the voices rattling around inside her skull, she torments the paying customers with a nasty selection of bugs, critters, and reptiles. These diabolical activities soon become an insufferable bore, forcing this grandmotherly nut job to exponentially increase her psychotic tendencies. Using a dusty series of underground passages to accomplish her lofty goals, Evelyn effectively slices and dices her way through the odd collection of guests who have made the questionable decision to spend the night at the motel. Can they band together and stop this crazy old woman before she kills again?
Drenched in eerie atmosphere and scored with the noise scooped directly from a schizophrenic musician's nonsensical nightmare, Mountaintop Motel Massacre is a lot more interesting than it has any right to be. What passes for a story is basically an inbred redneck redux of Psycho, with a demented old lady in place of the immortal Anthony Perkins. Though the groundwork itself may seem very familiar to those who spend way too much time indoors, McCullough's execution of the material couldn't be more different. If you enjoy watching elderly people stumbling through narrow passageways, this flick was tailor-made just for you. Congratulations, loser!
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