As usual, some of your universe's critics are uncharitable about Corpse Eaters. For example, reviewer Hezakiah4 writes, “Go to a field and count cow pies; it will be much more worth your while than scoping out this flik.” Reviewer Logan-22 writes, “The Corpse Eaters is hilariously awful, incompetent, yet strangely compelling in that way only bad '70 movies can be.” And reviewer Coventry writes, “In short, it simply doesn't deserve to exist.”
Read on for an accurate appreciation of Corpse Eaters...
As do all intellectually satisfying horror films, Corpse Eaters begins with a disclaimer. A man in a suit sits down in a dark room. A disembodied voice (with a pronounced Canadian accent) disclaims, “Attention, please. The motion picture you are about to see contains certain very stomach-upsetting scenes. The producers feel they have a moral obligation to warn each and every ticket-buyer of this fact. Although most people have the ability to cope with the sudden nausea and shock, there are some people who cannot handle it. Test audiences, after watching this motion picture, suggested that a warning of some sort be included before each scene they felt to be upsetting. Therefore, the producers have inserted a special warning buzzer and picture of a patron reacting to the scene. When you see the man turning green and the buzzer sounding, those of you who feel you cannot take it, please do not look at the screen. Here is what to look for.”
The man in the suit turns his head and stuffs a handkerchief into his mouth, feigning nausea.
The film itself then begins at the Happy Halo Funeral Home, where the funeral director comforts a man who recently lost his father. When the man leaves, the funeral director gets a phone call from the local coroner. “Course we can accommodate him. Business is never good enough, you know.” He also assures the coroner, “You know, we’re the finest in town when it comes to restoring faces.”
In a visually striking shot that hearkens back to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), the funeral director leaves his place of business to walk through a cemetery at dusk.
As the funeral director drives his car around the cemetery, we hear his thoughts as he considers the fresh body brought to the funeral home, reportedly mauled by a bear. His thoughts are intercut with the mortician, Bill, beginning the embalming of the corpse (shown mostly offscreen). Then the funeral director simply drives back to the mortuary, where the corpse is already in a casket, ready for viewing. The director concludes with satisfaction, “Any bastard’ll look like an angel when I got through with him.”
The filmmakers cut to the next day at a lake, where two young couples ride a motorboat to a secluded rocky beach. The thrilling boat ride takes about five minutes and is shown in real time. The couples play twangy rock music, drink Molson beer, and make out on blankets. In a scene that can only be described as intensely erotic, one of the young men pulls off his date’s bikini top and spills Molson beer on his date’s breasts. Creepily, the double date is watched by an owl sitting in a nearby tree.
Later, the couples talk about what to do. One of the women suggests a rock concert, but her friend Alan is dismissive. “A rock concert? Christ, we’ve been to every one for the past month.” He adds, “I got it. Today’s Friday the thirteenth, right? Let’s spend the night in a graveyard?”
They draw straws to decide what to do and the graveyard is the winner. Alan says, “Uh, one problem. Where’s the nearest graveyard?”
His friends know that there is a graveyard nearby, so the filmmakers cut to their car driving up a dirt road (sadly depriving the audience of more shots of the couples riding in the motorboat). “Well,” says Alan helpfully, “here we are.” He adds, also helpfully, “People are dying to get into this place.”
His date Lisa says, “And how are you going to get in? Dynamite the door, eh?”
They find their way easily into the cemetery, where it begins to rain. They find an unlocked mausoleum. “It’s dark in here,” says Rich. “There don’t seem to be any lights.”
“Hey, I found a candle,” his girlfriend says. They light a lantern, revealing a creepy vault where a human skull sits among the cobwebs — on a pile of other skulls.
The men persuade the women to stay in the tomb because of the rain outside. Rich, trying to think of something to do to pass the time, suggests something his uncle used to do — tell stories about the occult while conducting a seance. They all sit down around a vault and hold hands. “Concentrate on anything,” Rich says. “Concentrate on something.” He tries to remember how his uncle ran these seances: “Lucifer, Lucifer, Barabbas, Barabbas, Santanas, by Santanas, come, come, come.” Unfortunately, this rather specific incantation appears to have no effect so they try the exact same thing again. This time, lightning strikes outside. Also, the audience is treated to portraits of the frightened double-daters shot with a fisheye lens.
The audience is also treated to an effective sequence of the dead rising from the cemetery, as the Satanic spell has revived them and apparently released them from the confines of their coffins.
They hear something outside, so Rich leaves the crypt to find that it has stopped raining. He looks around for a few seconds, then returns to tell the others nothing is outside. However, as he speaks, a pair of hands grabs him and pushes him down. Three zombies appear and invade the crypt. One of the women is killed but Rich, Alan, and Lisa make it back to the car, helped in part by a handy shovel.
As they reach the car, the warning buzzer makes its first appearance, with the man in the suit covering his mouth with a handkerchief.
The filmmakers were justified in employing the warning buzzer (used here for the first time, 23 minutes before the end of the film), as the next scene is grotesque: a colorful shot of the zombies in the crypt eating the young woman’s insides with their bare hands! The camera even zooms in and out to show the devastating cannibalistic carnage.
The three survivors drive away in their car (sensibly stopping first at an intersection for safety before speeding onward). They reach a hospital, where Rich is wheeled into an operating room. “I don’t know whether we can save him,” the surgeon says bluntly to Alan and Lisa. “His wounds are pretty serious.”
The filmmakers then show an extended (and clearly real) onscreen injection, but for some reason fail to include the warning buzzer.
There follows a dramatic surgery sequence, with the surgeons’ concerned faces intercut with a ticking clock and shots of Alan and Lisa in the waiting room, but no shots of the actual surgery. The scene culminates in a heart rate monitor flatlining. The surgeon enters the waiting room to find Alan and Lisa optimistic, but he must tell them the truth. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could to save him. I can’t understand it. His system seemed to reject everything we did to help him function normally. I can’t understand it.” He adds, “This is a really strange case.”
Lisa faints, so they give her a hospital room and a sedative. She has dreams of the zombies that attacked them, and then she has a vision of Rich climbing out of a coffin that ends in a strange, vampiric embrace.
Shockingly, Lisa has become a zombie. She wakes up in her hospital bed, bites Alan on the throat, and then kills a nurse in exactly the same manner as Karen Cooper stabbing her mother in Night of the Living Dead (1968). (Oddly, the filmmakers fail to include the warning buzzer for this gory sequence.)
Then Lisa wakes up again — the zombie murder was simply another dream a la An American Werewolf in London (1981). Alan comforts her. “What happened, it just happened,” he tells her. “Nobody was responsible for it.”
The film returns to the funeral home from the opening, with Rich’s body in a coffin. The funeral director insensitively tells the mortician, “I’ll just say good night, and get back to all those forms and red tape you have to go through to bury some dead piece of meat.” The unfeeling funeral director, however, soon gets his comeuppance as he sits in his office drinking whisky. We see Rich’s corpse rise out of the coffin in the other room. The drunk director (i.e., the funeral director, not the film’s director, presumably) stumbles out of his office to the funeral parlor, where he sees an empty coffin, though somewhat confusingly Rich is still in his coffin, apparently dead.
Suddenly, the warning buzzer sounds and the suited man pretends to have nausea. The funeral director sees a zombie eating a corpse’s face.
Then Rich rises and eats the funeral director’s eyeballs, which the other zombie helpfully removed and tossed aside.
The final scene shows the funeral director being strapped into a strait-jacket and thrown into a cell. Tellingly, the man’s eyeballs are still in his head. “I’m not insane!” he screams to the camera. “I’m not insane! I’m not insane!”
The End
Corpse Eaters is part of a classic run of zombie films released in the early 1970s, between the successes of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). It shares some qualities with its forerunners such as I Eat Your Skin (1971), Deathdream (1972), Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972), Garden of the Dead (1972), and Messiah of Evil (1973) -- namely, fairly low budgets, unknown actors, charming regional locations in North America, and a sense of deep existential dread that not only can people die at any time but also that their corpses may rise to kill other people. (Perhaps something was occurring internationally in the early 1970s that informed such feelings, but I have no time to consult your universe's historical documents.)
One of the most fascinating features of Corpse Eaters is its Caligariesque structure. It begins with the unpleasant funeral director at the Happy Halo Funeral Home, moves on to the story of the young people raising the dead with their Satanic incantation, then returns to the funeral home for the climax, and finally moving on to an asylum for its chilling coda. Like other films with similar structures, it forces the audience to ask questions about what is really going on. Were there ever any zombies, or was the entire film the ravings of an insane funeral director? Did the young people even exist? What does Corpse Eaters mean? Are the corpses being eaten (as in the finale) or are the corpses doing the eating (as in the cemetery attack)? And why can't real life have a man in a suit feigning nausea whenever something disturbing is about to happen?
Unlike other films with similar structures, however, the middle section is not a story told by anyone, or a flashback of some sort, but it is simply the bulk of the movie. As such, Corpse Eaters is a mystery within a mystery that can never be solved.