Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

So this Friday night I sat down to catch a horror flick. As you can tell by the date, it's that time of the season. Well, what better than a film called Poultrygeist, right? That's gotta be a good horror film, right? Wrong. Somehow this piece of dreck got a "fresh" rating of 64% on Rotten Tomatoes.

This "film" is a Troma Entertainment release from 2006 directed by Lloyd Kaufman. It is apparently supposed to be a satire of the fast food industry in which a character by the name of Arbie is hired by "American Chicken Bunker" to get back at his ex-girlfriend, turned activist lesbian, Wendy.

Okay, this film seems to get a lot of praise from the underground, low-budget aficionados out there. To be completely fair, many would lump me directly into that group of people. I love schlocky, low-budget horror films. The problem is, one reason why I like "terrible" horror movies is because they were almost always not meant to be terrible. Most of those filmmakers seriously tried to make a legitimate horror film and failed. Like a guy who thinks he's funny but is terrible instead of a guy who doesn't know he's terrible and funny.

While watching Poultrygeist you can plainly see the entire crew knew they were making a schlocky film, and it comes off like a bunch of friends getting togther to shoot footage in their backyard and then crudely stringing it together with some "fart" sounds for added effect. I simply don't see the allure of that if it's clear that you aren't putting any effort into something you should otherwise be passionate about. Lloyd Kaufman has been making movies for decades, the final result looks like a poorly realized student film.

This movie is nothing but a box of bad puns and cliches wrapped with a bow of terrible acting, flat singing and terribly unfunny scenes. I was willing to give it a chance, but after 20 or so minutes of virtually nothing interesting, funny or seriously horrible going on (just "comedy gore") I gave up. I kept watching though, hoping it would get better. Spoiler: it didn't.

After watching a lame parody of Subway's Jared (who was morbidly obese in this film) paint the restroom in feces, ending with a "smaller," skinless version of himself ripping his way out of his skin, I couldn't take much more. Perhaps the film could improve and find some kind of direction, perhaps it could re-find the plot and get on with it instead of dabbling with terrible vignettes.

I made it to the scene where the director makes a cameo when it finally hit me - this movie is terrible. Terrible script, terrible acting, terrible direction... and everyone involved knows it. It's a lower budget version of the already low-buget Asylum films.

Based on some of the extremely over-the-top reactions I have uncovered regarding this film, you'd think this was groundbreaking stuff. People are praising it in some of the most exaggerated, absurd reviews I've ever seen, so it's hard to not get that impression. Then again, "The Room" gets a lot of this fake praise too - but you know that 99.9999% of the people writing those reviews are mocking it - the "positive" reviews are nothing but false praise.

If you like it, good for you. Enjoy.