MOTEL HELL (1980)
Directed by Kevin Connor
Starring Rory Calhoun and Paul Linke
Dated black comedy featuring Calhoun as a farmer who uses human meat to make his award-winning smoked sausage. "It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent fritters," is his slogan. He also runs an inn, "Motel Hello," but when the "o" in the neon sign goes out it looks like it's called "Motel Hell." Pretty clever.
The concept was originally covered by the classic musical "Sweeney Todd—about a barber who turns clients into meat pies—and is being used quite a lot by Asian filmmakers these days, most notably in the sick flick "Bunman."
Farmer Vincent "plants" his victims, by severing their vocal chords and putting their live bodies in his garden, with only their heads exposed. When they're fat enough, he kills them and turns them into meats that everyone within a 100-mile radius is addicted to.
There's an excellent chainsaw battle between a dopey cop and Vincent at the climax, but it's not enough to make this a great movie. It's slow and dated by today's standards and, at best, is worth catching as an artifact from the early 1980s gore era.