Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This week, we have ourselves a treat! Our movie this time around is the horror-comedy (and, at times, kind of sexy) Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies starring the always fun Karen Black.

Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies is yet another movie that I first saw on Bizarre TV some eight or nine years ago. I really can’t tell you how key Bizarre TV was in terms of the explosion of exploitation and obscure movies in my life. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: B-Movie Enema has so much to credit Bizarre TV for in terms of this site’s existence. I saw movies on that Roku channel that I had never seen or heard of before, and it sent me down rabbit hole after rabbit hole seeking out the movie and learning more about others like it. If it weren’t for my turning the channel on late one night in early March 2016 and waking up to this fascinatingly bonkers Mexican monster movie, this site would have never returned from the inactive state it had been in for over a year.

As for Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, this is one of those movies that has the look, feel, and general attitude of a late night Showtime or Cinemax movie that guys who either just hit puberty or never matured past it would drool over and watch. It is a movie that is shot in southern California. It takes place in sunshine or in scenes washed in a primary color. It features a lot of Playmates. It treats sex and sensuality in a sort of comedic and old fashioned nudie cutie sort of way while being rather explicit at times in one way or another. It’s directed by a guy who mostly made sexploitation movies. That’s a perfect late night Showtime or Skinemax storm.

However, this movie is a little different in one key way. There are two people in this cast who are former Academy Award-nominated actors. In a brief role, we have Pat Morita, best known for being Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. Granted, around this time, it was not uncommon for him to appear in a movie like this. After all, he was in the Andy Sidaris classic Do or Die. In that, he has a moment that is very clearly sexual and not at all what I would have expected from the “wax on wax off” guy. Er… I mean… Never mind.

However, the lead in this is Karen Black. Black was a very interesting actress. There was always something sultry about her. In the early 60s, Black moved to New York and planned to become an actress. In 1966, after spending some time on stage, she got a lead in a Francis Ford Coppola film, You’re a Big Boy Now. In 1969, she appeared in Easy Rider, which then led to her big-time break out in 1970, Five Easy Pieces. If you’ve never seen Five Easy Pieces, see it. It’s a deeply interesting character study of a man who has either failed to live up to or trying to run away from his expectations having grown up in a cultured, high-class family. Karen Black plays the embattled girlfriend of that man, played by Jack Nicholson. She is amazing in the movie (as is Nicholson). That got her an Oscar nomination.

Then, in the 70s, she kept working in high-profile stuff. She worked with Robert Redford, Robert DeNiro, Nicholson again, Kirk Douglas, Christopher Plummer, Robert Duvall, Gene Wilder, and Gene Hackman when they were all at their height or their stars were rising. In 1975, she turned in a powerhouse three-way performance in one of the all-time great TV horror movies, Trilogy of Terror. In the first half of the 80s, her career was starting to decline. She started appearing in indie films and horror movies while still appearing in the occasional high-profile movie. But her works in horror led to her appearing in Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses as the matriarch of the Firefly family. That, Trilogy of Terror, and her other counterculture work earlier in her career made her a cult figure. Absolutely, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies is part of that legacy she gained in the late stage of her life and beyond her death in 2013.

We have a quartet of sexy ladies who work with Auntie Lee in her pie business. The most famous of the four is definitely Teri Weigel who plays Coral. If there was a movie that required a sexy woman who would show her tits and get played on Cinemax, Weigel was your girl. I remember there was a particular guy who would come into the video store I worked at in the late 90s who would ALWAYS talk about her and judge an exploitation movie based on whether or not she was properly used (or used at all). She’s appeared in a couple movies I’ve covered before – Cheerleader Camp and Return of the Killer Tomatoes. Fawn is played by Kristine Rose who only had a few roles in movies but the ones you’d typically expect, and appeared in Playboy videos and magazines. Another Playmate to appear in this is Ava Fabian who plays Magnolia (and probably my favorite of the four nieces of Auntie Lee if I do say so myself). Lastly, we have Pia Reyes who appeared in a dozen films, all as a sexy girl or in a movie that was 100% shown on late night premium cable. She plays Sky. Also, Reyes was in a Steven Seagal movie (On Deadly Ground) as, what else, a dancer.

Alright, enough of this chit-chat bullshit! Let’s get into some pies!

I will say that I do like that the credits get chomped up like they are being eaten. That’s a good way to start your cannibal movie that has a food item in the title. Anyway, the movie opens with a guy driving down the road and getting a wheel blown out by an unseen shooter. The guy gets pretty upset that he doesn’t have a spare. It should also be noted that it seems as though there is a person in the backseat bleeding profusely. He flags down a car driven by a priest and decides he wants it for himself. So he pulls out a gun and tells the Padre to pull over and GTFO.

Well, that’s the original desired outcome. When the preacher begins praying, the guy blows the preacher’s brains out. This causes the car to veer off the road and get all kinds of messed up. I give it to the killer, he thinks fast. He decides to take the preacher’s clothes and poses as the preacher. When he walks back to the road, he flags down a convertible driven by one of our lovely nieces, Magnolia. He immediately drops the disguise and says she needs to be nice to him and pulls his gun out for her. He makes her pull over and he punches her. He seemingly rapes her, and when he’s done, she pulls out a sharp needle from her hair and stabs him in the head, killing him. She packages him up in a body bag and drives off.

Goddamn… Less than 8 minutes into this movie and we’ve got preacher brains all over the inside of one car followed quickly by deadly revenge for rape.

Magnolia returns home. There, she gets a tongue-lashing (the unsexy kind) from Auntie Lee who spots she’s got a bruise on her cheek and a run in the stockings. Auntie Lee says she needs to stop letting men take advantage of her, but Magnolia says she tried to get away and fight back but the guy had to be at least 250 pounds. Auntie Lee is less worried about Magnolia’s bruise and runs now that Magnolia has brought home 250 more pounds of meat for her.

In town, Fawn is making a meat pie delivery to a restaurant and getting, um… fawned over.

Just outside of the town of Penance, California, Fawn picks up a hitchhiker named Bob Evans. He’s headed to San Francisco. She asks if he’s expected in San Fran, and he says that he isn’t. In fact, when Sheriff Pat Morita pulls up alongside Fawn, he ducks. He skipped on a bill at a diner, and now the fuzz is after him. She invites him back to her house. He says he’s vegetarian, but she promises him something she could whip up that he’s sure to like.

Probably, like, I dunno, a really good baked potato. Surely that’s exactly what she means because in no way, shape, or form has every single line out of Fawn’s gorgeous lips been a double entendre. Anyway, Fawn tells Bob to go into the pantry to get some glasses for them to have some wine. She locks him inside the pantry and she hits a button that causes a blade to come out and decapitate the poor son of a bitch. His body is then dropped into the basement where Auntie will butcher him.

What’s kind of wild about this movie is that it’s a tale of two completely different types of light exploitation horror-comedy. On one side, you have the four incredibly sexy nieces of Auntie Lee. Everything about them is to attract your gaze and keep you watching this movie for when they will pop up next so you can wager exactly how much leg or cleavage they’ll be showing. On the other side of the movie, you have the movie that Karen Black and Pat Morita are a part of. They are clearly the top tier actors in this flick.

It’s not that this movie is born from two spec scripts and mashed together to get something made. That’s not it at all. It is very clear that this entire script and movie was specifically written to be this comedic horror movie with lots of eye candy. Yet, Black and Morita are making this into a movie that is way better than it should be. There’s a scene in which Morita’s Sherrif Koal has picked up Coral who is stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire and a flat spare. He brings her home where Black begins mildly flirting with him, but not in this overt way. He kind of flirts back but not in an overt way either. Instead, they seem like people who have known each other for a very long time. They are flavoring to this rural county. They feel and play like actual people. I’m guessing that is part scripting and part two very professional actors with long careers and lots of experience. Their scenes together are absolutely wonderful.

What’s more is this movie is 100 damn minutes long. This would have been like the Ben Hur of late night premium cable skin flicks in 1992. Movies like that rarely hit 90 minutes. Forget about comedies, horror films, or comedic horror movies… There’s no way anything like that would have made it much past 90 or 95 minutes back then. This movie is legitimately trying on its thin budget and I always remembered that about it.

Auntie Lee sends Sheriff Koal on his way with a big basket of vegetables. As he drives back to town, he comes across Auntie Lee’s dim-witted handyman, Larry. Larry is also played by another long-time actor of some serious talent, Michael Berryman. He’s kind of a Lennie type from Of Mice and Men. He’s well-meaning but mentally challenged. He had a scene previously where Fawn yelled at him for not cleaning the hubcaps on her car. To punish himself for making such a stupid mistake and forgetting to clean them as she asked originally, he smashed his head up against the car until he made himself bleed. He’s now out on the road walking to Coral’s car to fix the flat tire. Sheriff Koal takes pity on him and gives him a lift out there.

There is an additional element that has come into town from New York, a private investigator named Harold Ivars. He’s been hired by the Evans family to find Bob. He followed him out to Penance where Harold determined that Bob never left town. Before he heads back to his hotel room in town, he spots Magnolia going to the general store. He tries to sweet talk her, but she keeps him at something of a distance. Outside the general store, Magnolia does invite him back home to make some love, but Harold turns her down because he has to turn up something about Bob Evans before he can do anything else.

Out on the road, Coral and Sky are tasked by Auntie Lee to shoot out the tires of a car from out of state. A car carrying a rock and roll band with New York plates drives by. They shoot out the tires and cause them to drive off the road. Sky and Coral approach them and say they live just right over there and they have a phone they can use to get help with their tires. Honestly, if my death was to be forced off the road with a flat tire and be picked up by a couple of smoking hot cannibals… I’d be okay with it.

And I gotta be at least twice as smart as this band of fuck boys combined.

Auntie Lee fakes a call to the service station and claims there is no available tow truck until first thing in the morning. Auntie Lee invites the boys to stay the night. Later on, the girls each pair off with a member of the band while Auntie Lee prepares dinner and serves hors d’oeuvres. Auntie Lee and her nieces are not fully aware of how much trouble is starting to pile up around them in town.

The first thing that happened earlier is Magnolia goes through the Rolodex of the names of the people they’ve turned into meat. She finds that Fawn did bring home a boy named Bob Evans. Usually, Fawn is considered the “smart one” but this time she brought home someone who had a tail on him and that tail is asking everyone around town if they have seen Bob Evans. More on that in just a moment…

The next thing that is complicating things for Auntie Lee concerns Larry. After Larry goes to the service station to get the spare tire fixed, Koal spots Larry and wants to try to help him as he rearranges some of the stuff in the trunk of Coral’s car. As Koal helps, despite Larry’s protests, the Sheriff spots a bag and wants to know what’s in it. He uncovers a skeletal hand. Koal takes Larry to the station for questioning.

Now back to more of the Bob Evans investigation that Harold is conducting. He stops off at a farm. Earlier in the movie, the farmer was sitting on his porch and spotted a young man getting picked up by Fawn. Of course, that’s Bob Evans. When he tells Harold that he did see the guy, he tells him that Bob’s in pretty bad company. He says Auntie Lee and her nieces are a pack of whores and he worries the kid is gonna end up with one of those “sociable” diseases. He tells Harold where he can find Auntie Lee’s place and tells Harold to get lost.

At a kind of spooky dinner, the band, and the rest of us watching, learn that Auntie Lee and her nieces aren’t whores as much as they are Satanists. They pray to Satan before eating. The band is rather impressed by this. Auntie Lee asks Magnolia to go upstairs and bring “Baby” down because she’s “feeling better now” and can join them for dinner. Magnolia sexily gets up and sexily goes to get Baby. By the way, everything Magnolia does is sexy.

But what… or who… is Baby?

Of course, she’s a hot chick who acts like a baby and lives in a room inside a giant crib with a bunch of creepy baby dolls pinned to the walls. Baby is played by Petra Verkaik. Wouldn’t you know it? Petra was a Playmate. Who woulda thunk it?

I am famous in my friends group for saying that the 1973 movie The Baby is one that makes me physically ill to watch. I hate watching grown people, particularly men, slobber and shit themselves and act like a literal baby. It’s disturbing in ways I cannot fully describe. Now, don’t mistake that for me shaming you fucking weirdos who like to do diaper shit. I am not shaming you whackos for liking that sort of bonkers goo goo ga ga business. You do you, you fucking abominations. Also, I’m not shaming people who need to wear diapers for incontinence. I am rushing headlong into my golden years where I expect to be wearing Depends in no time.

In this movie, “Baby” is not the same thing as The Baby. I look at this character as being a straight-up opposite parody of Grandpa in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They are at a dinner. They are definitely eating people. They have a yet-to-be-seen member of the family to reveal and instead of it being an old man, it’s a sexy chick with the mind of a baby. It doesn’t cause the same visceral reaction in my very being that The Baby does. Instead, it just makes me chuckle that things are quickly getting crazier and crazier and we started with the idea of a family of sexy cannibals.

Back at the Sheriff’s station, Koal asks what this bag of body parts is and what has he gotten himself into. Larry says that there were people who were against him and said he needed to be put away. Koal point-blank asks if he killed Bob Evans. He says he doesn’t know any of the names.

At Auntie Lee’s, John, one of the band guys, starts laughing uncontrollably. He says that not only does Auntie make the best meal but she also gives the best entertainment. He thinks the whole thing with Baby was a put-on, so the girls get mad at him, and Sky, who paired up with him, storms off. Fawn suggests he go after her while another band member, Doc, helps Magnolia take Baby back to her room. Doc sees chains attached to the ceiling of Baby’s room to restrain her when she gets a little wound up and violent. Magnolia chains him up while Baby starts kissing and fondling him. Soon, she begins taking whole bites out of his neck.

So one band member is down. Elsewhere, John finds Sky to apologize for laughing about Baby. After literally saying “fair enough” to John saying he crosses his heart and hopes to die in sincerity over his apology, she asks if he would like to see the food prep room in the basement. Believing that would be a surefire way to get laid, he says he would like to see the food prep area. He and Sky start making out in the basement while Auntie Lee locks down the house.

The two remaining band members start looking for places they can go with their girls. Fawn takes Phil to her room which is Stonehenge themed. She puts on this whole act saying she wants to take a shower. She uses the lighting in the room to show her silhouette undressing and then taking a shower which is just streamers blowing out of a pipe shooting air out of it. When she comes back, she makes like she’s gonna make with the makin’ love, but, instead, she gouges his eyes out and hacks him with a cleaver.

In the basement, John decides to smoke some pot which pisses Sky off, but she agrees to give him more of a tour of the food prep room. He sees a head hanging in a pantry and she surprises him with a hook in the throat and suspends him as he dies. That leaves only Craig who is still talking to Coral. Coral escorts Craig to her bedroom. He nearly gets distracted by the door of Baby’s room being open. He kind of likes the idea of watching Doc and Magnolia fuck. Coral stops him from going in and leads him to her room.

Coral’s room is snake-themed. She also has a pet snake named Simone. She feeds Simone a giant rat. As Simone eats her meal, Coral starts getting pretty darn excited. She then decides to do some freaky shit with Craig by painting him with some sort of body paint. She dances around and moans like she’s starting the sex thing without Craig. Well, she’s definitely going to be doing that because her giant snake things in her room come down and impale him on the fangs.

You gotta give it to the set decoration, lighting, and how each girl’s room is shot. Each of the three rooms we saw, Baby’s, Coral’s, and Fawn’s are imaginative. They are basically shot in three distinct ways. Baby’s is kind of scary with the darker blue and harsher red with the baby dolls pinned to the walls. Fawn’s is shot like a Playboy video by using her silhouette to accentuate her seductive act. Coral’s room turns up the black light and has those bitchin’ snake sculptures. Sure these rooms are hardly feasible or functional, and they are definitely just sets in a black box sort of design, but it’s effective.

After the band has been killed and butchered, the girls are surprised by the doorbell ringing at a very late hour. Magnolia goes to check it out and finds Harold on the other side of the door. She invites him in and offers him a glass of red wine. She opens the fridge and hands are in the compartments in the door. She wants him to go into the pantry to “get some glasses” for them but blood is oozing out from under the pantry door. She opens the cabinet to get a couple glasses and hands and feet are stashed away in there too. It’s a cute and kind of funny scene.

Harold says he is there to look for Bob Evans. Magnolia says that it had to be Fawn who saw him. She handles all the pick-ups and deliveries. She says Fawn is doing her nightly laps in the pool. Fawn pulls him into the pool. Fawn says she saw him, she picked him up, she did him, and he left with a smile on his face. Soon, each of the other nieces join them in the pool and circle around him, splashing him with water. They all begin stabbing him in the back with needles like Magnolia did the guy at the very beginning of the movie. Harold dies in the pool.

The next morning, Sheriff Koal makes his way out to Auntie Lee’s with Larry. Fawn lets them in and tells them that Auntie is in the kitchen. Koal tells Auntie that Larry’s acting weird and going around and killing people. He stashes the bones of those he killed in Coral’s trunk. Auntie is shocked and has to sit down. She asks Larry if it’s true that he confessed this to Koal, and he says he did because the people he killed made fun of him.

Koal says he wanted to come over and talk to Auntie first before he handed everything over to the State Police. Once he does that, Auntie’s business is likely going to take a hit because everything is gonna go public. Fawn asks if it’s possible to let Larry go. After all, it’s only Larry’s first offense. Koal says this is serial murder. He just can’t do that.

So… Auntie signals to Fawn and she offers the Sheriff a cup of coffee. But first, she turns off the power to the garbage disposal and asks for his help with it. When he sticks his hand down in it, Auntie turns the power back onto the disposal and Fawn flips the switch. Auntie Lee grabs Koal’s gun and blows his brains out.

And that’s how the movie ends! As the credits run, Fawn and Auntie Lee talk about how close things got for them this time. They consider packing up and moving east to New York City where she can open up a diner and they’ll never run out of beef. We see a hand grasping to open the cellar door and all the cars of past people they’ve done away with over the years out behind her house.

Like I said, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies is better than it ought to be. This is a movie that could have been taken very seriously as a legitimate theater release if the nieces were cast as actresses who weren’t mostly skin-flick actresses and Playboy models. That’s not a dig on any of the lovely ladies of this movie. They actually were pretty good at playing the wide-eyed, innocent-on-the-surface sirens. Their casting and a few minor things in the script that weren’t quite as clean as it could have been are really the only things that keep this movie from being something more than a late night cable exploitation cult classic. Karen Black, Pat Morita, and Michael Berryman are doing exactly what you would hire that trio to do. The four nieces are doing exactly what they were cast to do.

It’s a neat little dichotomy of two very different approaches. That trio of seasoned actors is the glue that makes this something a little bit more while those girls are keeping your goddamned eyes glued to that TV screen. I wish I had seen this back in 1992 or 1993 when I was the perfect age to really appreciate this for the cult classic it is. And… also… have some nice dreams of being one of the victims of Auntie Lee’s nieces.

Alright, let’s get the check and head out of here. Tomorrow night, on B-Movie Enema: The Series, we’re hosting the Italian thriller The Fourth Victim. Be sure to go to YouTube, Vimeo, or come right here to the site to watch that. Next week, we have a fun little pseudo-theme for the entire month. After doing 435 of these articles, I realized the only letter of the alphabet that I’ve never covered in terms of a title is the letter Q. Let’s fix that and then some! Join me for the start of Quly with the 1996 Jean-Claude Van Damme martial arts period piece The Quest.

And… If I don’t publish that article or you never see me again, just know I got picked up with Magnolia and I died a very happy man.