This Month

Though it seems to have been with us forever, the intentional creation of a "cult film" didn't really exist until the late 1970s with the mass acceptance of midnight movie screenings from coast to coast. As film school geeks got their hands on camera and paid tribute to their favorite genres, resulting in oddball hybrids like J-Men Forever, Forbidden Zone, and on the really obscure side of things, Big Meat Eater, a Canadian sci-fi/musical/monster comedy.

The jarring plot follows and eventually unites two separate story threads, with the first chronicling the misadventures of Turkish boiler attendant Abdullah (Clarence Miller) who murders the town mayor in a fit of occupational pique and winds up in the employ of butcher Bob (the excellent George Dawson), who decides to stash the unfortunate corpse in the freezer. But wait! Hovering above the small town, two aliens set their sights on the butcher's shop since his cold cuts produce a valuable resource called "Balonium." To harvest this product, the aliens bring the mayor back from the dead and arrange the construction of a "Vision of Tomorrowland" exhibit which will actually serve as their home base on Earth.

Originally conceived as a satire of Canadian mores with monster trappings, this peculiar hybrid was the brainchild of three Canadian film students, Laurence Keane, Chris Windsor, and Mike Chechik. Though its style was likened at the time to comedic names like the Firesign Theater and National Lampoon, the end result actually cannily foreshadows the affectionate ribbing and emulation of classic '50s monster movies found in the likes of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and Ed Wood. That said, it's significantly less polished than those later works and suffers from the inevitable consequences of its scattershot approach; while the song and dance routines contrasted with grisly plot twists are undeniably effective, the climactic teen-against-aliens trappings get old long before the final scene. It's not quite as maddening in its random desperation to please as, say, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but we're definitely in the same territory. Most of the participants in front of and behind the camera didn't go much further than this, but they did manage to pull off a curiosity with more than its fair share of pleasurable moments in between its occasional lulls.

Barely released theatrically and shuffled off to very early home video cultdom just long enough to startle a few unprepared rental customers, Big Meat Eater has remained an underground secret for decades and will likely remain so. Nevertheless, the DVD presentation is respectable enough with a watchable if not stellar video presentation (better than the tape but not by much), while the noticeably improved sound mix at least gives some welcome punch to the numerous depraved ditties. Unfortunately there's a dearth of bonus material to give any context to these shenanigans, so unprepared viewers are left completely to their own devices.

For more information about Big Meat Eater, visit Koch Vision. To order Big Meat Eater, go to TCM Shopping.

by Nathaniel Thompson