CORPSE EATERS (1974) **

Corpse Eaters is the first Canadian gore movie.  Even though it holds such an illustrious distinction, it isn’t very good.  Nor is it original as it blatantly rips off scenes from Night of the Living Dead, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, and the works of William Castle.  There’s even a long stretch that owes a debt to Ring of Terror as well.  It somehow winds up being less than a sum of its parts, but some of its parts are amusing. 

A surly funeral home director bosses his mortician into doing a rush job on a dead guy who was “mauled by a bear”.  Flashbacks reveal that he and his friends spent Friday the 13^th at a graveyard performing rituals that resulted in the resurrection of the dead, and it didn’t take long for them to become a hot lunch for the zombies.  If the mortician isn’t careful, he may find himself on the zombie menu as well.

Corpse Eaters is only fifty-six minutes long and it simultaneously feels way too long and not long enough.  There are long stretches where nothing happens and when you combine that with the droning soundtrack, you have a recipe for Snoozeville.  However, if you’re able to keep your resolve, you will be treated to some decent zombie attack scenes. 

You almost feel like this started off as a short, but then more scenes got added to bulk up the running time.  The bookending scenes with the funeral home director go on way too long and are pretty much only there as filler.  The confusing “It was only a dream” ending doesn’t help matters.  (There’s also another “It was only a dream” scene early in the film to further flesh out the running time.) 

Fortunately, the film has a great gimmick, which at the very least helps make it memorable.  In the opening scene we are shown a spinning hypnotist wheel and told we will be warned whenever a gory scene is about to happen.  The gore itself is pretty cheap as the guts look like raspberry jam, but the warning shots of a theater patron losing his lunch in the aisle are effective. 

The scene that basically sums up my feelings on this movie is the introductory sequence when we first meet our four ill-fated friends.  There is a LONG scene of them driving their boat around a lake that seemingly goes on forever.  Just when you’ve about lost your patience, the one guy pours beer all over his girl’s chest, rips her bikini top off, and the two proceed to bang for a LONG time right in front of their friends!  I guess what I’m saying is that if you are willing and able to sit through long sequences where nothing happens to get to a long sequence of sheer nuttiness, then you just may eat up Corpse Eaters.