Auntie Lee's Meat Pies

 

If you've ever seen the movie Microwave Massacre, you know that cannibal flicks have the potential to be goofy and over the top. Hell, any kind of film can be that way if it chooses to be. Auntie Lee's Meat Pies chose to go that route and then some considering how many tonal shifts that it holds onto during it's duration. 100 minutes for a movie like this sounds like a long time, but I somehow didn't find it to be a chore or a grind to get through. The overall pace was pretty quick, even with the bizarre filler in between to carry the viewer where it wants them to go on this journey of Pat Morita as the only cop in an entire town (literally) Michael Berryman playing the mentally challenged grounds keeper for Auntie Lee's property, and Karen Black as Auntie Lee herself. On the surface here for about the first hour it's a pretty strong, off-center cannibal movie with some truly awful ADR, cinematography and dialogue, smoking hot ladies portraying Auntie Lee's nieces (particularly Ava Fabian as Magnolia) and very serial killer-esque glints here and there of all of the women in the house shoving and stuffing various body parts through out the kitchen and all over the house in general. Towards the end after the detective that's looking for Bob Evans shows up at the front door (yes, there is a guy in this flick where his character's name is Bob Evans) Magnolia lets him in and distracts him to the point of not noticing any of the severed limbs in the cabinets and the fridge as they are talking and she is pouring them some red wine. How grotesquely classy. But right around the hour mark, this thing gets really fucking weird after this metal band gets the tires shot out by two of the girls and have no choice but to follow them to Auntie Lee's house. Sorry guys-your band sucked anyway. That demo you played was atrocious.

Every girl has their own room in the house and each one is more strange than the next. The first one you see though is for "Baby" which is a fucking chick in her twenties, acting like she's a few months old or something, and they bring her down to the dinner table in this gigantic stroller. Gnarly. She also drinks from an oversized baby bottle that has no business existing and every inch of her room has all of these random naked girl dolls with their arms and legs intertwined with the chain link fencing that makes up her walls. With black lighting behind them. Now that I think about it, all of their rooms have black lighting in them. The craziest one of them all though has to be Coral's room. The room has an altar with these gigantic snakes on either side of it and a glass case in the middle with a relatively large rattlesnake living in it, just waiting to eat. Anything. Her and one of the idiot band members goes in there, she pulls a white rat out of one of the snakes mouths, feeds it to the real one, and then does some body painting on the guy before these massive, mostly off screen snake fangs come down from what seems to be the ceiling and gorges him in the fucking chest. What a wild goddamn movie.

Karen Black and Pat Morita? This is going to be quality.

 That gun that just shot out your tire had no recoil at all.

This dude with the cigar looks like Sarge from Quake III.

A sexy brunette with a lever action in the trunk? My kind of girl.

That was the worst rooster call I've ever heard. Oh wait, it's a donkey. Nevermind.

His name is Bob Evans? C'mon now.

"The only ties I've ever had, I donated to Goodwill."

What?! How often do these girls lead men into the pantry that it's booby trapped with a decapitation machine?

I'm pretty sure the fertilizer she uses is made from dead men's body parts somehow.

Good morning, Magnolia-my third arm is saluting you right now.

Zits and zombies, I don't know what to ultimately say about Auntie Lee's Meat Pies. I enjoyed watching it for this initial run, but I don't think I'll ever have a reason to come back to it. Let me say this-I was going to blind buy it on blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome, but I'm glad I watched it on Tubi first because now I probably won't. It is pretty weird and fun to see Pat Morita of all people in a film like this because he really doesn't strike me as an actor that would want to be in an insane cannibal movie where he gets his hand ground up in a garbage disposal, but hey-he probably needed work and money at the time and he did star in a couple of Andy Sidaris flicks as well so maybe he did have a taste for human flesh, hot lead and heavy bewbs. He was a man after all. And so am I. Auntie Lee's Meat Pies is a really bizarre, fun time if you're in the specific mood for a nutty cannibal film from the early 90's, and like every other movie like this it has a cult following, but I won't be joining and worshipping this piece with the rest of them. Oh, Karen Black is a satanist here too which is why she makes the meat pies in the first place. You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat.