Lunch Meat (1987)

Directed by Kirk Alex [Other horror films: N/A]

More than anything, Lunch Meat is a bit of a tedious film. The plot isn’t anything terrible, but the approach is quite dull, and I don’t really think Lunch Meat has a lot going for it.

In fact, the most interesting thing about the film is that, if you search for it on IMDb, it won’t come up. This seems to be because one of the actresses, Ashlyn Gere, later went on to do pornographic films, and maybe IMDb thinks Lunch Meat is one of them. Maybe because it has “meat” in the title. It’s odd, because other films she was in, such as Creepozoids, Dreamaniac, and Evil Laugh, all come up without an issue.

That’s easily the most interesting thing about Lunch Meat, though. The story isn’t bad – imagine if Wrong Turn were made 16 years earlier on a shoe-string budget, and you’d get the picture. A man and his three sons kill people for meat, and six young folks run amok of them. It might sound like an okay film, and it probably could have been under different circumstances, but it just feels so dull.

To be honest, none of the six protagonists (Bob Joseph, Ashlyn Gere, Joe Ricciardella, Marie Ruzicka, Rick Lorentz, and Patricia Christie) really stood out. I guess Ricciardella had some of the better scenes – trying to set traps against those coming after him – but they were all relatively without character and pretty interchangeable. The four cannibal antagonists (Chuck Ellis, Mitch Rogers, Robert Oland, and Elroy Wiese) were a little more interesting, but not much, and certainly none are anywhere close as fun as we get 16 years later in Wrong Turn.

Also, the gore is pretty non-existent. I guess there’s a decapitation somewhat early on, but it’s one of the least memorable decapitations imaginable, and few of the other scenes do much. Someone gets stabbed a lot, a couple of people get a pickaxe through the foot, and someone gets beaten with a stick, but there’s nothing here that would really impress most people.

A movie like Lunch Meat could have been, at the very least, entertaining, but the approach the film takes is so dry, even during the more action-oriented portions. There’s never much in the way of tension or dread, we never really learn much about the characters, and it’s just a rough movie throughout.

5.5/10