SHOCKtober! Mountaintop Motel Massacre
Look at that poster! Look at that title! This movie has got to be great, right? RIGHT?
No.
Mountaintop Motel Massacre has been in my collection for the better part of this decade, yet I only watched it last week. It came in a boxed set of b-movie horror flicks and I kept it simply because of that title. But this low-budget redneck slasher is more than a bit disappointing. The premise is fantastic: a woman is released from a mental hospital and sent back to live with her daughter. Together, they run the Mountaintop Motel. While the daughter practices some sort of animal/voodoo rituals in the tunnel under the motel, she worries that her mother is slowly losing her mind again and will have to be sent back to the nut house. The mom finds her daughter performing her rituals and kills her. Shortly after the funeral, the voices in her head return and she decides the motel visitors need to die.
Sounds good so far, right? Add this to the setting – rural hillbilly country – and we should have a winner on our hands. Sadly, this movie is downright terrible from start to finish and what could have been a great slasher winds up being terribly boring. Crazy momma spends much of the movie spooking the visitors by putting rats and bugs in their rooms and doesn’t get to the killing until the last twenty minutes. And even then, the kills are implied and done off camera. Too much time is spent trudging along in useless exposition facilitated by dreadful actors and too little time is spent developing what could have been a great time.
The most entertainment you’ll get out of Mountaintop Motel Massacre are the laughs brought on by the redneck actors with their awesome 80s hair and fashion. Feathered hair and Aqua Net, baby!
Aside from that, stay away from this film. It’s not nearly as entertaining as the title – or this trailer – would imply.
