Blood Diner

1987 horror comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Brothers kill visitors to their diner in an effort to bring some Egyptian goddess to life.

Maybe I'm a chauvinist, but I can't believe this movie was directed by a woman. She's Jackie Kong who also made Night Patrol and a couple other movies. There's a warning at the beginning of the movie, but it's warning the viewer about the wrong thing. The movie isn't horrifically graphic, especially by today's standards. It's embarrassingly juvenile though, and it has this mean streak that makes the entire thing really unpleasant. There's a scene where a bulbous man is being run over by a van repeatedly, and after the fifth or sixth time, while you're watching onlookers on the screen laughing and having a lot more fun than you are, you wonder what the point of the whole thing is. Another scene has a woman's head being hush-puppied and then swatted off. It's comic ultraviolence, and although I'm sure there's an audience for it, I was just wishing I could watch that new Evil Dead t.v. show instead. Or even something from Troma. When you pale in comparison to Troma, you're just not very good.

Some nudity; a talking brain in a jar voiced terribly by Drew Godderis, star of Cannibal Hookers; a handful of oddly-placed Nazi references; and a nifty musical performance near the end keep threatening to make this a little enjoyable, but it never quite gets there. I almost wanted to like it just because of this character:

That guy's the sidekick of the owner of a rival diner, and the other characters just kind of treat him like he's an actual human being even though he clearly isn't. That's at least something.