Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies

I think I can confidently say the only redeeming factor in this whole film is Pat Morita. Yes. He’s in it. Mr. Miyagi himself is in this movie as Sheriff Koal, the sole lawman for all of Penance, CA. Some of my favorite parts of him? The fact that he’s got almost a little bit of a southern twang to his voice. The fact that he smokes but doesn’t throughout the entire film. He almost constantly has a cigarette in his mouth and pretends to light it but never actually does. In fact, at one point he puts two cartons of cigarettes away in his desk drawer. He makes mention of his smoking a couple different times throughout the movie but never actually does it. It’s the wildest character trait that doesn’t really ever actually play out. I can’t imagine it was his choice to do so. I feel like it was a part of the script and vision for the character. I can actually almost believe that he purposefully chose not to smoke and just made it look like he was. Which was funny because in one scene there’s another guy in his office who actually does light up a cigarette and smoke it for real, making it that much more obvious that he’s NOT smoking. He’s also oddly attentive to everything going on with Auntie Lee. I know its germane to the plot that he’s involved with things in their family but he drives around a number of the members of the family in his sheriff-mobile. He also has a super Asian office. I understand he IS Asian so it’s not really out of character or anything. But he has two samurai swords on his desk. Two. The fact that one made it seems a little sus. But two? Maybe it’s to match his unsmoked cartons of cigarettes. Any way you slice it, no pun intended, Pat Morita is probably the biggest reason I watched this movie.

That’s it. That’s the end of the good stuff. Now I will say that this movie goes from “so bad” to “it’s so good” really fast. We waste no time crossing that bridge. The movie is a trainwreck in the opening scene. I don’t really want to go through every part of this movie because it’s just too much to pick apart. But we dive head first into the most ridiculous everything. The opening of this movie doesn’t make much sense. It’s a car driving and the tire gets shot out, making it seem like somebody is going to be abducted or assaulted. But the most abrasive crazy man gets out of the car and with the camera pointed up from the trunk we get a screen full of his face looking for a spare and being the angriest man ever that there is no spare. You’d think he’d know if he has one or not, but I think he’s stolen this car and maimed the person who owned it. You see a bloody hand reach up that I think is supposed to let you know this. He’s really upset that he’s gotta walk now but it’s for like 3 seconds until a priest shows up in his car. Normally you’d know he’s a priest because he’s dressed like a priest. It’s a pretty solid giveaway. But thankfully they plastered the dashboard with statues of Jesus and the interior of the car, including several windows are also covered in Christian bumper stickers. So that way we really know he’s a priest. Our crazy man stands in the road and just assumes the car will stop, which it does. He gets in immediately and the priest just starts driving like this is a thing that happens. There’s some super awkward dialogue as crazy man appears to like the car. The priest says words too and that happens. Then crazy guy pulls out a gun and the priest just keeps talking. Eventually Angry McCrazyface just shoots him and his head explodes as the car wildly drives off the road and into a ditch. It’s a good thing that car went a whole 100 feet. Now psychoman (not Goreman. PG is infinity times better than this guy) is walking again. But then Magnolia, one of Auntie Lee’s four nieces shows up and he once again just gets in the car and she drives off, again, like it’s just a thing that happens.

So she drives for a bit and he gets handsy and pulls his gun out again. I honestly don’t remember if she pulls over or they crash again and this was literally like 4 hours ago. That’s how quickly my brain is attempting to get rid of the memories. But they get out of the car and he slaps her around a bit. It’s definitely pretty awkward. Then I’m relatively certain he assaults her too. That was cringe to the highest level. It’s essentially his head sort of bobbing up and down like we’re watching him from her perspective. He rolls over after he’s “done” and then she pulls a big long thing out of her hair and stabs him in the head. So he dies. That’s the good part. She gets a body bag and puts him in her trunk. This this the first five minutes of the movie. What was the priest thing even for? Just so they could blow up his head? Where did this guy come from? Did we just need an a-hole right away so we could see one of the girls murder someone? It was just wild. So many questions and we were literally 5% of the way through the movie. Yeah, it’s 100 minutes long. You’d probably guess it might come in around a tight 76 minutes or something like that. Nope. A full hour and forty minutes. And it never gets any better than this. It just gets crazier and crazier.

There’s so many things about this movie that I feel like I need to talk about but at the same time I want be done talking about it. Maybe it’s the fact that they reference r*pe four times in the movie. The first time is SUPER casually after Fawn giggles. She picks up a drifter named Bob. We later find out that his full name is Bob Evans. Yup. Bob freaking Evans. As she’s driving past Sheriff Koal, Bob ducks down. Once they are in the clear she acknowledges he must be on the run from the law. He makes a joke that he was walking before she picked him up. She giggles at his crappy little joke and then asks “Was it r*pe?” Nope. He skipped out on the bill at a breakfast spot. Pretty huge gap between not paying your tab and sexually assaulting a woman. But we went there. And again, at this point we aren’t 10 minutes into the movie. One guy goes in the pantry and there’s a mechanism in there that knocks his head off his shoulders. There’s a button you press to do that. One guy goes up to Fawn’s bedroom later in the movie. It’s Stonehenge. Not like that’s the decorative motif of the room. She has Stonehenge in her room. That’s it. There’s a stone slab about the size of a small child’s bed in the middle so I guess that’s where she sleeps? I don’t know. She informs “Phil” she’s going to take a shower. You see her silhouette as she removes her shirt and then it’s her darkened image against a bright blue backdrop from the overhead blacklights she has all over her room. First station is her taking off her stockings. Then she moves to the second station where she “showers”. I put it in quotations because it’s a fake shower. She has the handles that are floating in midair. They’re connected to a pipe that goes up and when she turns them, I’m pretty sure a fan turns on where the showerhead is because the streamers stuck to the showerhead simulate that water is coming out. Then she moves to the third station where she towels off and puts on a robe. She steps back into the light and canoodles with Phil a little more before burying her thumbs in his eye sockets. That kills him, by the way.

This movie is bonkers. The kills are insane. Auntie Lee is insane. The acting is insane. The dialogue is insane. Everyone is really aggressive in delivering lines. It’s so weird. Meanwhile, that crazy looking dude from The Hills Have Eyes plays Larry, Auntie Lee’s brother who is a lot slow. It’s just the wildest ride from beginning to end and not in a good way. There’s a German guy who runs a little grocery. Not sure why he’s German but it was definitely a decision. There’s a private detective who has been tasked with finding Bob Evans because his presumably rich father is looking for him. I don’t know why he’s on the run. Don’t know how he made it from New York to Penance, CA. I’m not sure why everyone in this movie has such a disdain for anyone from New York, but that’s definitely there. The only thing I can fathom is that the guy who made this movie, who is also a writer, producer, and director of adult films as well, made this off some extra cash he had sitting around. Couldn’t have cost more than $40 to shoot the whole thing, I’m convinced of it. This movie is the definition of a trainwreck. It’s definitely so bad it’s good. But it’s SO bad. So I’m just saying be forewarned.

The real question ends up being how do I rate this movie. In reality, it’s less than a 1. But I can’t give it that because again, I’d watch this one again before I’d do 28 Years Later. Hopefully that paints a very vivid picture of how much disdain I truly have for that film. And THAT Movie had a TON more nudity than this one. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. But’s not worthy of like an actual good score either though. I will say for a minute or two on the front end of the movie I wondered if I’d end up getting this on physical media. I looked it up and it was done by Vinegar Syndrome, which did not surprise me at all. I could have also see Shout do this one but VS definitely makes more sense. I even looked it up on eBay and found a couple listings that I could have potentially been ok pulling the trigger on had this movie stayed on any kind of real course. But it didn’t. And Pat Morita was not enough to get me to spend money on this film. There weren’t enough fun or decent special features to entice any further either. Nothing that would really pull you in to some trance where you accidentally bought it either. So I have to weigh that into the mix. I’m leaning towards a 3.5. I even had 4 typed out but it didn’t feel right so I retracted it. I’m capping it at 3.5. That’s higher than it deserves, honestly. It’s a movie you need to talk about with someone because it needs to be digested. So if we do get the Spooktacular up and running or even just if we start back out of the gates featuring some horror flicks, I might have to make Ron watch this movie just so I can mentally move past it. Because it really is a wild ride of a movie. But while it shares many similar traits to a “Samurai Cop”, “Miami Connection”, or “Birdemic”, I don’t have a Rifftrax to go with it so I can’t, in good conscience, actually own this one. I said what I said.

So we’re here and we are officially on the downward slope towards Halloween now. We’ve reached the hump of October and scaled it. It’s only a couple weeks away to trick or treating and the end of spooky season. I’m having enough fun that this isn’t really a chore. But I can’t pretend I’m not eagerly awaiting the fading of black and orange and the emergence of red and green everywhere. Mariah is thawing as we speak. That’s all I’ll say. Ghosts and goblins still get their due right now. I won’t short change that any more than I have to. But as for Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, they are cooked. So until we do this one on the podcast, I’m calling it a night. I’ll catch you on the flip side.