Dis­cov­er the T&A tit­il­la­tion of this home­cooked horror

It is hard­ly sur­pris­ing that tits and ass fea­ture so promi­nent­ly in ​’80s hor­rors. After all, the slash­er – that most ​’80s of sub­gen­res – is focused upon young co-eds’ rites of pas­sage, with their nubile flesh serv­ing as the visas for an often ter­ri­fy­ing entry into adulthood.

T&A are also promi­nent right from the begin­ning of Wayne Berwick’s Microwave Mas­sacre, which opens with close-up track­ing shots of a young woman’s heav­ing cleav­age and wig­gling bot­tom as she walks towards a build­ing site – and soon all that the builders with­in can see of her, as she is tak­en from behind by a passer­by while peek­ing through a knot­hole in the site’s fence, is her bared breasts pro­trud­ing through the aper­ture. In what might as well be a sce­nario from a soft­core com­e­dy, two of the randy young builders race for­ward for a clos­er look (and an attempt­ed grope), but a third is left behind.

This is Don­ald (Jack­ie Ver­non) – mid­dle-aged, hang­dog, and far more pre­oc­cu­pied with the bizarre ​‘gourmet’ sand­wich that his wife May (Claire Gins­berg) has packed for him than with the woman at the fence. Don­ald is to be our unlike­ly pro­tag­o­nist – and if the film’s open­ing objec­ti­fies that woman, reduc­ing her to her meaty parts, that is what Don­ald will soon be doing in a rather dif­fer­ent way to prac­ti­cal­ly every woman who cross­es his path.

Don­ald, you see, is a man of sim­ple tastes, and out of step with his times. A work­ing class Andy Capp fig­ure who arrives home tip­sy every night from the pub to be scold­ed by his nag­ging wife, his prob­lems are emblema­tised by the new-fan­gled microwave oven that May has pur­chased. For while she keeps prepar­ing him exot­ic lunch­es and din­ners, he would pre­fer a basic baloney sand­wich – and fol­low­ing one of their fre­quent argu­ments over food and (lack of) sex, he drunk­en­ly kills her. After slow-broil­ing and slic­ing May’s corpse and stor­ing the parts in the fridge, Don­ald realis­es that eat­ing her is not only a good way to hide the evi­dence, but also yields ​“some­thing ten­der and easy to pre­pare with a min­i­mum of effort.” And his obliv­i­ous work­mates like eat­ing it too.

Hav­ing vio­lent­ly sep­a­rat­ed him­self from a love­less, sex­less mar­riage that last­ed decades, Don­ald realis­es for the first time that he likes to have his women and eat them too – and so embarks on a spree of car­nal culi­nary killing, lit­tle sus­pect­ing that the microwave which has become his most impor­tant kitchen tool might also, iron­i­cal­ly, prove the death of a senes­cent man like himself.

Ver­non was best known as a dead­pan come­di­an, and here, in what was to be his last movie appear­ance (he died in 1987), he con­stant­ly cracks wise with gags that could have come straight from the Borscht Belt – and from a bygone era. It is just part of what is so dis­com­fit­ing about this tone-deaf, misog­y­nis­tic weird­fest, where rape can be the punch­line to a joke, where female char­ac­ters are lit­er­al­ly fridged or clos­et­ed, and where the pros­ti­tute Dee Dee Dee (Lou Ann Web­ber) explains her name thus: ​“My moth­er want­ed to call me Delia, but she stut­tered. Hey, have you ever screwed in 3D?” Mean­while, even Don­ald is slight­ly freaked out by the over­sexed ​“very strange lady” (Karen Mar­shall) liv­ing next door who, when not engaged in three­somes, uses a vibra­tor as a gar­den­ing tool.

There real­ly are lots of tits and ass in Microwave Mas­sacre – and its female char­ac­ters are con­stant­ly treat­ed as mere meat to be con­sumed by men like Don­ald (and of course ogled by the view­er). Yet while now we may laugh ​‘iron­i­cal­ly’ at the sheer clunk­i­ness of an ear­ly microwave, big enough to con­tain a full human cadav­er, age­ing Don­ald would have struck even ​’80s audi­ences as being a throw­back and a dinosaur, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to sort through the dif­fer­ent fos­sil lay­ers buried in this film, even if dig­ging with a dil­do. This is nos­tal­gia at its most wrong, but also, for those of a cer­tain mind­set, it might prove a lost trea­sure from the trash – like the woman’s arm that a pass­ing bum finds in Donald’s rub­bish bin, and repur­pos­es as a crotch- and back-scratcher.

Microwave Mas­sacre is released on Dual For­mat DVD/Blu-ray by Arrow on 15 August.