A vintage splatterthon with the look and feel of the no-budget anti-classics made by H.G. Lewis in the early-to-mid 1960s. How interesting, then, that THE CORPSE GRINDERS, the most (in)famous film made by the late schlockmeister Ted V. Mikels (1929-2016), hails from 1972. It’s dated far more dramatically than Lewis’ films, which for all their ineptitude can at least be said to have delivered on their core promise of extreme gore. THE CORPSE GRINDERS, by contrast, doesn’t live up to its fearsome reputation at all, being shockingly subdued in its depictions of bloodletting—meaning the film’s one and only selling point is no longer a factor.
THE CORPSE GRINDERS (1972) Trailer
Hard core pornography, which (with the release of DEEP THROAT) came into vogue in 1972, was another impossible-to-ignore issue. THE CORPSE GRINDERS’ production values are about on par with those of most early 1970s pornography, yet its chaste (by post-1970 standards) bikini clad raunch harkened back to an earlier era, suggesting that the major achievement of this determinedly old school production was that it managed to garner as much attention as it did, being frequently designated a “cult classic,” spawning sequels in 2000 and 2012, and inspiring a 2025 remake.
The script, credited to Arch Hall, Sr. (of EEGAH and WILD GUITAR) and Joe Cranston (THE CRAWLING HAND), focuses on the Lotus Cat Food company, which uses human flesh for meat. The outfit is run by the unscrupulous team of Landau (Sanford Mitchell) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), whose major innovation is a corpse grinding machine, a “diabolical contraption that turn human bones and flesh into screaming savage blood death” (so claims the irresistibly hyperbolic trailer, likely a core component of the film’s success). This silly-looking mechanism is located in a multi-hued basement, where corpses of scantily clad young women are placed on a conveyor belt that feeds the bodies into the machine, turning them into hamburger.
The supplier of the bodies is the frizzy haired Caleb (Warren Ball), who’s seen interring corpses on an excessively smoky graveyard set (actually the grounds of Mikels’ own Glendale, CA home). Lately he’s seen an uptick in business due to the fact that many LA area cats have been inexplicably going crazy and killing their owners.
One of those crazy felines is given an autopsy by Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney). He finds traces of human flesh in the animal’s stomach, and concludes that the taste inspired a frenzy of bloodlust. Glass and his sexy nurse companion Angie Robertson (Monika Kelly) research the Lotus Cat Food company and learn that it’s an unlicensed operation run by one Mr. Babcock (Ray Dannis), whose wife (Zena Foster) directs them to the company’s headquarters. From there, events follow their inevitably violent (and inevitably stupid) course.
One can’t help but admire the innumerable excuses Ted V. Mikels finds to get his actresses into skimpy outfits in a film packed with strip downs (a reminder that in 1972 the so-called nudie cutie genre wasn’t too far in the past). Mikels proves far less inspired in his depiction of gore, which feels halfhearted, although the frequent cat abuse, of which this film contains more than any other I can think of, is disturbingly convincing.
Beyond that, THE CORPSE GRINDERS plays exactly as you’d expect. The acting is uniformly stilted, the photography cut-rate and often out of focus (Mikels claims his cameraman at one point asked him to “come over here and teach me how to load this camera”), and the music score comprised of public domain library cuts (credited to “Music Industries”).
The narrative construction and hard-boiled dialogue (“next time out: no money, no meat!”) have a determinedly noirish air, which combined with the notably artful, near-subliminal intercutting—in which close-ups of the meat-grinding machine in action (complete with noisy sound cues) occasionally punctuate the action—suggest that Mikels may have had ambitions that stretched beyond the schlock-horror filmmaking model in which he specialized. If that was indeed the case, those ambitions obviously went unfulfilled.
Vital Statistics
THE CORPSE GRINDERS
CG Productions/T.V. Mikels Film Corporation
Director/Producer/Cinematography/Editing: Ted V. Mikels
Screenplay: Arch Hall, Joseph Cranston
Cast: Sean Kenney, Monika Kelly, Sanford Mitchell, J. Byron Foster, Warren Ball, Ann Noble, Vince Barbi, Harry Lovejoy, Earl Burnam, Zena Foster, Ray Dannis, Drucilla Hoy, Charles “Foxy” Fox, Stephen Lester, William Kirschner, Curt Matson