Stand up comedian and sometime actor Jackie Vernon had his last movie role in this laugh riot camp horror film. Jackie plays Donald, a construction worker whose wife May (Claire Ginsberg) is trying to get him to eat her experimental dinners. She does this supposedly for his own good, and does it with the assistance of her microwave oven (a real gargantuan artifact). Finally, he can take no more of her nagging and, in a drunken rage, bludgeons her to death with a salt grinder. He comes to realize that he likes the taste of human flesh, so goes out and kills more people to feed his newfound appetites.

Written and produced by Craig Muckler and Thomas Singer, and directed by Wayne Berwick, "Microwave Massacre" is a pretty tasty morsel when it comes to horror comedy. It's full of utter ridiculousness, and absurd dialogue, not to mention some deliciously tacky gore effects and one utterly priceless severed head. The amusingly deadpan Vernon alternates between being sincere, and letting the audience in on the joke by breaking the fourth wall. His interactions with victims and other characters are a joy to behold. We have a hooker named Dee Dee Dee (Lou Ann Webber),a psychiatrist (John Harmon, who'd acted for director Berwicks' father Irvin in things like "The Monster of Piedras Blancas" and "Malibu High"),a doctor with the childish moniker of Von Der Fool (Ed Thomas),a hottie foreigner (Anna Marlowe) who makes a living dancing in a chicken costume, Donalds' fellow construction workers Roosevelt (Loren Schein) and Philip (Al Troupe),and Sam (Phil De Carlo),a grumpy bartender who doesn't want to hear his patrons' sob stories. Ginsberg is perfect as the kind of nagging wife that would drive any husband mad.

This movie keeps coming up with enough wacky and irreverent shtick to sustain it through a very reasonable one hour 17 minutes run time. Just don't expect to see the title appliance come into play all THAT often while it plays out.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm so hungry I could eat a whore.

Seven out of 10.

Humor and horror don't easily mix together into a solid, cohesive, evenly balanced and satisfactory whole. It takes real skill and expertise to make such a precarious blending of diametrically opposite elements work well together. Well, this totally ineffective and often painfully unamusing clinker makes for a particularly sad example of just how horrendous a horror comedy can be when said necessary skill and expertise never manage to materialize in the film itself.

Late, great wiseguy comedian Jackie Vernon portrays a meek, hen-pecked construction worker who offs his peevish wench of a shrewish wife, chops her up into itty-bitty pieces, wraps the body parts up in tin foil, and stuffs the remains in a freezer. One day Jackie noshes on some of his old lady's remains and subsequently develops an unsavory cannibalistic hankering for tasty female flesh. Pretty soon Jackie starts killing comely, flirtatious, available young lasses so he can ravenously eat their sweet delicious meat in order to appease his insatiable sicko appetite.

Wayne Beswick's flaccid direction fails to inject any much-needed hopped-up vitality into this tired'n'tasteless tripe, thus letting "Microwave Massacre" crawl along at an excruciatingly gradual and seemingly never-ending lethargic tempo. The unceasingly crude catalog of bad big breast jokes, cheesy gold chains, poor prostitute japes, hideously unsightly mountainous masses of overpermed curly white guy Afro coiffures, silly swinging singles jests, moronic profanity jibes, scanty denim hot pants, putrid fake penis gags, shabby bell bottom jeans, and sophomoric sexual hi-jinks all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cheerfully rancid'n'raunchy 70's bathroom humor has dated as well as the leisure suit and 8-track tapes (i.e., not well at all). However, Jackie tries admirably in a rare substantial lead role; his droll, low-key sense of nicely bemused "why me?" humor supplies some faint entertainment in this otherwise extremely tiresome junk. Acclaimed fright film production designer Robert Burns cameos as a mangy derelict who scratches his crotch with a severed arm he unearths in Jackie's garbage can. It's a genuine shame that the negative of this woefully unfunny would-be horror black comedy wasn't tossed in a trash can along with the witless script.

MICROWAVE MASSACRE is an extremely broad, bad-taste comedy horror flick about an overweight guy who tires of his wife's bad cooking and decides to bump her off before devouring her body. The whole thing plays out as a lowest-common-denominator comedy with bizarre situations and supposedly comedic touches straight out of an independent Troma-style production. The acting is non-existent while the jokes consistent of workers ogling a guy walking suggestively through the streets. The film does have some gruesome moments but the quality of the special effects is very poor so there's nothing disturbing here. For Arrow to have marketed it as a horror movie is really disingenuous.