So I'm watching Motel Hell right now - one of the only reasons I have actually loved owning a television with cable for the past year is the happy fortuity that is finding crappy movies you haven't seen for over a decade. It's no 1970s or early 80s, gorgeously taught DePalma flick P (as split screens from Sisters, Blow Out, and Dressed to Kill dance through my head)- this I will admit. Made in 1980, the film cornily constructs a nexus of late 20th century anxieties about food production and consumption, police authority, and the decline of morals in our culture. Like most mainstream horror flicks, the film reinforces - in not so subtle ways - expectations of middle-class propriety. In other words, the aged swingers, the skanks that contract social diseases from ski instructors, and the nomadic, drugged-out rockers (including "Cliff Claven" - John Ratzenberger - as the drummer) are the ones who get chewed up (literally and figuratively) by the masses for straying too far from the herd. Soylent green is the people you say? Actually, they're just beef jerky. Makes you look twice at a Slim Jim, eh?
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