Random Movie: Blood Diner (1987)

Like many of you in my age range, you probably have fond memories of roaming the aisles of the local video store and gazing at all the great VHS covers to try to pick that night's movie. Blood Diner was definitely one of those films with eye-catching box art that has evaded me for years. I prefer it had stayed that way.

Over the course of the past ten years, this site has been no stranger to low budget horror movies across the spectrum of great to downright awful. Blood Diner firmly sits toward the latter category. I am willing to forgive a whole host of filmmaking mistakes and gaffs in exchange for a creative story, good scares, great gore, or some other X factor. With the exception of a ten minute span way after this film has tried and broken my patience, all you can expect from this is wooden dialogue, terrible line delivery, stupid characters, and a bunch of random bits to hopefully label this as irreverent and silly. It is instead cheesy and annoying. 

Perhaps writer Michael Sonye and director Jackie Kong bit off more than they could chew with a story about cannibal brothers, an uncle's head marinating in a mason jar of Sierra Mist, and the resurrection of an ancient goddess to bring about the end of the world ... or something like that I believe. Rick Burks and Carl Crew star as the brothers, Michael and George respectively who run a diner as a front to lure young women to their deaths and to helpfully dispose of the excess human tissue by feeding it to their patrons. On the case are the two worst cops in horror movie history, Shepard (Roger Dauer) and Jackson (Lanette La France), the former who makes wildly inappropriate sexual advances and the latter who stumbles through line readings with the expertise of a fourth grader. Like all good horror movies cops, they are horribly inept and stumble ass-backwards (literally) onto solving the case while hinting at stupider things like the "Enema Bag Rapist."

There is so much disjointed nonsense in this movie that it's really hard to make heads or tails of it other than to ascertain that it doesn't work at all. While it predates this film, Blood Diner seems to be going for a Dead Alive blend of horror and zany comedy but falls well short considering that nothing is especially funny or scary, and worst that the characters are way too over-the-top to be mistaken for real characters in a fucked up situation that the movie likes to present. And god, it's so cheap. The film looks like it was shot through a container of vaseline, almost all of the dialogue is ADR and badly done at that, and at certain point, they don't even bother with folly effects to even pretend to be a real movie.

Also, there's an almost ten minute unnecessary detour when one of the characters wrestles a blond guy with a Hitler mustache and Nazi armband, helpfully called Jimmy Hitler. Unlike yesterdays AVPR, this film's 90-ish minute runtime drags and drags since there is nothing going on that you will possibly care about. Except for that one sequence I mentioned which is like Return of the Living Dead in craziness, but far less competent. Skip the reservation on this one.