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.

Frogs

Frogs is a 1972 "eco-horror" film staring Sam Elliott and Ray Milland featuring amphibian killing machines Hellbent on terrorizing an upper-class U.S. Southern family on their plantation home.

Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) is a millionaire who invites his family to his home for his birthday. Pickett Smith (Sam Elliot) is a nature lover and photographer down in the swamp to take pictures of nature for a magazine. Opinions collide when it's discovered that Jason Crockett kills off practically everything that enters his property by using massive amounts of poisonous chemicals. Of course, the bodies are going to quickly pile up, as the noise of *ribbit* sounds like payback is coming soon.

Frogs was probably one of my best movie watching experiences. It's fun, and schlocky, but also well made enough to enjoy as a legitimate film. Shockingly this film never made it on the MST3k chopping block, though it's sister movie, Squirm did. Squirm was about killer worms terrorizing a family and invading a small town eating everyone in their path. Frogs was that exact same plot, but on a smaller scale since the frogs, as well as the other maligned creatures, only attack a southern estate on a small island.

Considering the title of the film, it's strange that it never seems like the Frogs do any of the killing. They're appear in a role more suited for, say, a "General" sending out troops of other animals that actually *DO* the dirty work. The film itself ends on one of the most bizarre and laugh educing awkward cuts that they could possibly come up with.

Check it out.

It's October!

So I had hoped to kick off October with a "horror movie review" of the new film, Dream House staring Daniel Craig, Naomi Watts and Rachel Weisz.

Well it turns out it's not much of a horror movie. Heck, it's not much of a movie, probably because going into the movie after seeing the trailer was a mistake. The movie was watchable, though a bit on the mediocre side. It was certainly not worth my time once I found out the first shift of the storyline (the first "twist reveal") which was exposed smack dab in the middle of the trailer. They gave away most of the reason why you're watching the film!

***Spoiler alert!*** This would be like exposing that Bruce Willis is a ghost, or that Kevin Spacey is Kyser Soze. Okay, that spoiler alert was lame. I will not do it again.

Had the movie used the trailer as mis-direction, and had the story be a lot more complicated than was presented (that the family wasn't dead or that his psychosis was much deeper than presented), I'd be a lot more forgiving of the final product.

I think the showings earlier in the day were so sparsely filled that they saved money by simply not turning on any of the pre-preview commercials and keeping the lights off in the theater. It was pretty sad.

That sounds terrible, but I've heard worse. My parents foolishly went to see Battlefield Earth when it was released back in 2000. It had miserably opened the previous week - was still in all the print advertisements for this theater, was still on the marquee, but the theater actually [i]saved[/i] money by not showing the movie at all. That's right. The theater was apparently empty, so it was more cost effective for them to simply turn off the lights and not run the projectors. I think they actually did finally wrangle up 15-20 people which made it worth the theater's effort to show that terrible dreck.