E. Hampton Beagle

People come from far and wide to sample Farmer Vincent's distinctively flavored dried, smoked sausages, but one might well ask why there are so few people staying at his nearby motel. This horror comedy provides the graphic answer. It seems that the good farmer only uses the highest quality, specially processed human meat in his treats. To prepare the meat, he first harvests healthy tourists from his hotel. Next, he plants them into the ground up to their necks and with a sharp knife carefully slices their vocal chords. He and his portly sister then feed the victims until the meat is tender and well marbled with fat. Afterward they are promptly slaughtered, minced with a few secret herbs, and stuffed into sausage casings, which are then carefully aged in the smokehouse. His operation is abruptly cut off when Vincent's normal brother, Bruce, learns about the secret ingredients. In the end, the brothers grab chain saws and have a blood-soaked showdown.

A bright and ambitious TV reporter on assignment with her photographer at a southern California power plant learns of an impending control room crisis involving the plant's supervisor.

A hapless, hustling young attorney, Leo Harrigan (Ryan O'Neal), is on the run from an irate client when he falls into the hands of pioneer independent filmmaker H. H. Cobb (Brian Keith). As Harrigan begins writing for Cobb's Kinegraph Studios, he meets Kathleen (Jane Hitchcock), an aspiring actress, and falls instantly in love. Hoping to avoid the prying eyes of larger, rival production companies, Cobb hustles Harrigan off to direct several silent action films in the prairies of the Midwest. Although one of the major studios sends an enforcer, ex-alligator wrestler "Buck" Greenway (Burt Reynolds), to make trouble, after a fight with Harrigan, he agrees to join the company as its leading man. And during the filming of an action sequence, Buck and Kathleen are brought together in the basket of a runaway balloon and agree to marry. The entire crew, including Alice (Tatum O'Neal), a teenage truck driver who runs her own prop rental business, moves to Hollywood where they walk into a nickelodeon that is showing edited versions of the films they have been sending Cobb. Irate, they confront the studio tycoon and announce plans to form their own company. But the restrictions of a large studio and a romantic triangle conspire to break up the relationship until they reunite at the opening of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," where a new age in filmmaking is born.