Sometimes, after a long marathon of watching really bad action movies and fantasy films, you want to kick back with a good old fashioned horror movie. If you have chosen to watch Mountaintop Motel Massacre then you may have chosen incorrectly.
Prepare for a shit show.
Mountaintop Motel Massacre
Evelyn is a sweet old lady that has recently been released from the mental institution. She and her daughter run a quaint little motel in the mountains. When Evelyn discovers that her daughter has been doing strange things in the basement of the motel, she does what any loving mother would do: kills her with a hand sickle. Soon after that, Evelyn starts to hear voices that tell her to kill anyone and everyone that stays in the motel. Needless to say, this is not the ideal location for a family getaway.
Mountaintop Motel Massacre is just a really bad movie, all the way around. I know it was meant to take advantage of the 80’s slasher craze and meant to be seen in a drive-in with your girl squeezing your arm, but come on.
Evelyn comes off less as a homicidal maniac, and more as a woman that is just bored and really has nothing better to do with her time. At first she lets pests out of cages in the tenants rooms; aside from the occasional rattlesnake, they are almost completely harmless things like roaches and a few rats. More of a nuisance than anything, really. She walks around in the crawlspace of run down shanty-style houses and opens a trap door in the bathroom to get into the house. Creepy, sure, but not scary.
The cast of characters other than Evelyn is actually pretty great. Not that they are consummate actors; it’s actually the other way around. The token black guy (Crenshaw) seems to be the only one with a brain in his head. I was really rooting for him to make it out alive. At one point he vocalizes the inner dialog he is having, realizing that he has absolutely no reason to be staying in the motel in the first place. There’s also a drunk preacher, a newlywed couple, two girls looking to get a break in the music business, and a salesman looking to take advantage of them. It’s pretty much the usual cast.
As Mountaintop Motel Massacre wound down to a close, I was really hoping that there would be a great “stinger” at the end of the flick. As the survivors leave the motel, there are a couple instances where it looked like some twist might actually occur — a random shot of the dead daughter, the car getting stuck in the mud (for a second). However, nothing at all happens. The last shot of the film shows the light for the motel coming on. Classic anti-stinger-stinger ending I guess. The movie is really bad, and not in the way I wanted it to be. This is probably the reason it took me about a week to watch it all the way through. Mountaintop Motel Massacre does manage to hit a lot of the finer points in both my posts about rules for surviving horror movies.
What I was left questioning at the end of the film was this: Does five murders really constitute a “massacre”? I mean, in the realm of horror movies, that’s pretty tame.
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