When director Kevin Connor looked at the script for
Motel Hell, he said it opened with a description of a fat lady on a bed with a dildo. Inexplicably, this was wrong to him. So he set out to make a more tongue-in-cheek, less trashy, version of the movie that is the kinda-sorta cult classic we know today.
Old school actor Rory Calhoun (the Keith Carradine of his time) plays the ruggedly handsome Vincent Smith. A farmer who makes very special beef jerky along with his sister, Ida. The leads aren't the traditional type of sweaty young slabs of meat who generally make up the casts of Horror movies. Instead it's an old guy and an overweight woman. Together they ensnare unsuspecting travelers in order to get fresh ingredients for their jerky. The ingredient? Do you really need it explained? Come'on, man.
Vince makes a late night capture when his booby trap knocks a couple off their motorcycle. It's one of those motorcycles with a sidecar. You never see sidecars much these days. Vince takes a liking to the female involved, a woman named Terry played by a pretty awful actor. When she comes to--instead of being like hey what's going on I need to go home--she just stays at the motel and hangs out. I guess she's into dads because she falls in love with Vince and tries to put the moves on him, but Vince is a man with principles and insists on getting married first. Ida doesn't approve and correctly believes that Terry will throw a monkey wrench in the whole "we murder people and turn them into smoked meat products" thing.
Motel Hell feels like a constant tug-of-war between being a true cult classic and just another average Horror movie. On one hand you have entertaining scenes of a couple staying at the motel who are into bondage and go nuts whipping everything in the room. On the other hand it's a poorly paced movie with long stretches of boredom in between such scenes. It has just enough goofiness to tilt it to the side of being memorable. But it's no surprise Kevin Connor would go on to mostly do a bunch of TV work (his six episodes of
Hart to Hart remain the series apex).
Vince and Ida keep their victims buried up to their necks in a secret garden. There they slit their vocal chords and hypnotize them with a magic pinwheel. When some of the victims escape (including a guy with a beard that couldn't look more fake) all hell breaks loose and the film climaxes with its most famous scene of Vince donning a pig's head; almost assuredly breaking the Guinness World Record for longest instance of maniacal laughter.
