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Director Ted V. Mikels is an acquired taste. Some people love his films to death, while others think he's nothing but a talentless hack. I fall somewhere in the middle, but I must confess that I find this film to be one of my guilty pleasures. The story here is rather straightforward and simple: The owners of Lotus Cat Food Company, Mr. Landau (Sanford Mitchell) and Mr. Maltby (J. Byron Foster), manage to stay in business competing with the larger pet food companies by keeping their overhead low. Very low. They do this by substituting their meat by-products ingredients with the flesh of human corpses, which they obtain from grave robber Caleb (Warren Ball) and a couple of workers at a mortuary, who supply them with fresh bodies of the recently interred or bums whose bodies will not be missed. As the demand rises for for their product, Landau and Maltby have a hard time keeping up with the supply, so they begin to rely on murder to keep them stocked with fresh meat. The only problem is, domesticated cats eating Lotus Cat Food begin attacking their owners and some of those owners end up dead, which attracts the attention of Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and his nurse/lover Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly), who are performing the autopsies. They begin piecing the pieces of the mystery together and discover all the murderous cats are being fed Lotus brand cat food. They go to the FDA to have the cat food tested and discover what the mystery ingredient really is but, remarkably, the FDA refuses to investigate further without more proof, so Howard and Angie go undercover to get more proof. They are not very good at undercover espionage (they really suck at it) and Landau and Maltby, who see through their ruse immediately, kidnap Angie. Howard must race to rescue Angie from the jaws of the corpse-grinding machine before she is turned into the ingredients for a new batch of pussy chow. Howard is given a helping hand from a mysterious stranger (whom we see stalking Landau and Maltby at various times throughout the film) and they save Angie in the nick of time; both Landau and Maltby end up dead, one of them getting chewed up by their own corpse-grinding contraption. As undoubtedly everyone already knows, this film is mostly famous for it's chintzy corpse-grinding machine, a plywood creation with flashing lights and levers where bodies are fed through one end (all the bodies are still in their underwear!) and come out hamburger meat on the other end. To me, though, that's the least interesting aspect of this film. What I find much more entertaining are the eccentric and downright ugly characters on view here, including beef jerky-chewing grave robber Caleb; his doll-carrying retard wife Cleo (Ann Noble), who treats the doll as if it was a real baby; the mute, one-legged Tessie (Drucilla Hoy), a Lotus Cat Food employee who hobbles around on one crutch while delivering the mail; and Willie (Charles "Foxy" Fox), the rubber-faced, impossibly skinny Lotus janitor who becomes the first live victim of the grinding machine. Director/producer/editor Ted V. Mikels (THE ASTRO ZOMBIES - 1968; BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE DEVILS - 1972; THE DOLL SQUAD - 1973; and many others) uses garish lighting schemes (bathing scenes in red and green gels), quick cutting (I laugh every time he cuts to shots of Caleb's caged geese for no other reason than to hear them squawk) and threadbare sets (the office of Lotus Cat Food is a study in minimalism; just a desk, a couple of chairs and a cheap hand-painted sign that reads: LOTUS CAT FOOD: "For Cats Who Like People"!), which all together make this film seem like it was made on some alternate version of Earth. Some people speak with a thick Cockney accent for no reason at all and the cat attack scenes are hilarious in their ineptitude (As the proud owners of two rescue cats, I can assure you this is not he way cats would attack). While there is no nudity in this film (the women walk or lay around in their bra and panties), this impossibly cheap film does have it's share of gruesome sights (including a graphic cat autopsy and a basement full of body parts) and some intentionally funny scenes (including Cleo feeding her doll soup at the dinner table). This film is also the last credit for Arch Hall Sr. (director of the classic badfilm EEGAH [1962] as well as being a producer/screenwriter of many of his son's, Arch Hall Jr., films, such as THE CHOPPERS [1961] and WILD GUITAR [1962]), who co-wrote the screenplay with Joseph Cranston. To me, THE CORPSE GRINDERS is one of those cheap independent horror films that more than lives up to it's title and reputation. Some people find it deadly slow, but I find it mesmerizing. Mikel made an overlong sequel, THE CORPSE GRINDERS 2 (2000) nearly thirty years later, but it's a crappy SOV shadow of the original. During the early 70's, THE CORPSE GRINDERS played on a popular triple bill with THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS (1966) and THE EMBALMER (1965) with a lurid ad campaign promising "The Final Dimension In Shock!" Also starring Ray Dannis, Vince Barbi, Harry Lovejoy, Earl Burnam, Zena Foster and Curt Matson. Originally released on VHS by World Video Pictures. Alpha Video offers a widescreen print on DVD that also includes the original trailer, a full-length commentary track by Mikels and a short interview with Mikels, all for less than $6.00 (It's a direct port from the more expensive DVD released by Image Entertainment a few years earlier). Most of Mikels' films can be purchased directly from his website: www.tedvmikels.com. Rated R. { text from critcononline.com }