Say, do you like roasted turkey? Boy, I sure do. For me, nothing says home cookin' like a big golden roasted turkey, some mashed potatoes and dressing, and a steaming bowl of green beans, fresh from the garden. But none of it would matter without that turkey, and no one understood this more than the sick motherfuckers who put together Blood Freak. As a courtesy, I suggest you stop reading before I give away too much, and just go find this fucking movie. It's so rare to find anything this close to perfection, and I sincerely envy anyone sitting down for their first viewing. Trust me on this one. It will wash over you with a glorious wave of relentless bulldada, like an enormous, satisfying bowel movement sliding out of your ass. This is as essential as it gets.
It's got all the usual elements of great badfilm: washed out color, bad lighting, actors forgetting their lines and looking away from the set, and editing that makes you wonder whether the raw footage was placed in a wooden crate along with seven thousand razor blades, then handed to a troop of gorillas at the Miami zoo for maybe a week or two. But it doesn't stop there, because it delivers a plot that melds the supposed virtues of fundamentalist Christianity, and the supposed evils of drug use, drug users, and biofarming, and it's all pulled together by a chain smoking narrator who guides you through the story with the coherence of an eighty five year old man just waking up from gall bladder surgery. He sits in front of a wall of simulated wood paneling. He has a mustache with gray sideburns, and a gold chain necklace dangling next to his glistening polyester shirt. He takes a deep toke off his cigarette every five seconds as he lectures about addictive behavior. He makes vague yet mundane observations about life, but delivers them with the pedantry of David Koresh or Marshall Applewhite.
The world, you see, is subject to constant change. Changes take place every second of every minute of every hour. Some of these changes are invisible because our level of awareness is limited. Some of these changes are good, and some of them are bad. We may meet a person who becomes a catalyst for change, or who leads us to the one who may bring about changes, which may be good or bad, by the way.
From that, we dive right into the film, with co-director Steve Hawkes as Herschell, sort of a Conway Twitty/Fabio hybrid, riding his motorcycle on the Florida turnpike. He meets a woman with car trouble who invites him back to her pad. The house is overrun with partying drug abusers, but the woman is a Jesus freak who asks him not to use any drugs while he's there. She wants to sell him on her extremely cogent religious world view, and what better place than a suburban Florida ranch home filled with pot smoke? As a further distraction, she has a slutty sister walking around in a bikini top and tight pants, trying to mount anything that resembles a carbon based organism. And Steve Hawkes is one carbon based organism that she can get excited about. Deftly, Hawkes and his co-conspirator Brad Grinter have established the point of tension for the film: we all have choices to make, and these choices lead to change. Changes may be good. Changes may be bad. But either way, get ready to have your sinuses raped by this movie.
At first, Herschell chooses the path of righteousness, and his new friend introduces him to her father, who tells him "I could use a husky man like you out at my poultry farm." Unable to reject financial propositions from middle aged men with orange living room furniture, Herschell eagerly accepts. But immediately thereafter, the slutty sister seduces him by the pool with a bikini and some reefer, followed by a spirited fur bumping session, and Herschell's path to the Lord is temporarily obstructed for sewer repairs. And unbeknownst to Herschell, the slutty sister obtained this reefer from her pusher boyfriend, who looks sort of like Pat Paulsen with an attitude, with the intent of getting Herschell addicted. You know, that special kind of addictive marijuana that has been documented on Dragnet and in William Bennett's hallucinations.
Blissfully unaware, Herschell rides over to the turkey farm for his first day of work. After a few minutes of turkey stock footage, he meets a pair of scientists, Lenny and Gene. They both look like the kind of guys you might see in the men's room at an Interstate 95 rest stop, only they're wearing white lab smocks. Their acting skills make Steve Hawkes seem like Sidney Greenstreet, with flubbed lines and awkward pauses that had me spitting beer out of my nose. They tell Herschell that he'll be doing some odd jobs around the turkey farm, but if he wants to earn some extra cash on the side, he can get involved with their "tests." These experiments involve the "chemical capinization" of turkeys, and all they need is somebody to eat the turkey meat after they've been capinized! It's not dangerous or anything, they're just trying to work around these damned government regulations, and to sweeten the deal, they even offer to throw in some dope. "We're on your side," they tell Herschell, Tomorrow morning, bring your appetite! Who could resist?
The next day, Herschell is sitting at a picnic table in a barn filled with cackling turkeys. Lenny walks in and gives him a whole roasted chemically capinized turkey wrapped in tin foil. He starts ripping off a leg and digging in, and after more turkey stock footage, we see him with the bony carcass, poking down the last of the turkey meat. Clearly there are strict scientific controls in place.
Herschell soon begins having convulsions, sort of like in a Devo video. Lenny, walking around with a clipboard, discovers him and delivers a gem of a startled reaction shot. More beer comes out of my nose. Lenny and Gene, fearing legal complications, take him to a remote location and dump him. But when Jesus Dad finds out, he hits the roof. So why did you take him out and dump him? Don't we have enough legal problems? All we did was feed him some turkey. You dumb bastards. Lenny and Gene write off their holiday bonuses.
As is so often the case, the highly addictive marijuana provided by a guy who looks like Pat Paulsen interacts with chemically altered poultry, and well, the next thing you know Herschell is walking around in Levi's with the head of a turkey. Worse, he can't talk anymore; he can only emit sad little gobbles. But all isn't lost, because he can still write notes, and when he scribbles his plight and hands it to the slutty sister, she stops screaming, sensitive acoustic guitar music is cued, and she empathizes, as Herschell softly gobbles:
God, Herschel, I just can't believe you're here like this. Do you think the effect will ever wear off? If it doesn't, you sure are ugly. I'm sorry. Herschel, I've got a guilty feeling about this. What would happen if we got married? What kind of life would we have together? What would the children think of their father looking like that? My god, what would the children look like? Herschell? What are you doing? Herschell?? Herschell? Oh my god!
What follows is almost certainly the only instance of implied fornication between a woman and a poultry headed mutant in the history of film. This is a great time for the chain smoking narrator to jump back in:
Interesting how when we come to moments of despair, when we can't seem to solve our problems any other way, then, but not until then, we turn to god.
Yes, that's interesting. When drugs and chemically altered meat have interacted and left you with a slutty girlfriend and the head of a turkey, then and only then will you turn to supernatural dieties, you cynical, atheist bastards. That goes double if you're addicted to the blood of drug addicts, forced to abduct women in bell bottoms, hang them upside down on a ladder, and lap up their blood as it sprays out of their slit throats. Oh sure, then you get interested in religion.
One other aspect of becoming a mutant turkey person appears to be an innate ability to find and kill drug addicts. Or maybe Herschell has just landed in a town full of junkies. But when a couple is shooting up in a van, Herschell skillfully hones in on them for a snack. Nothing says "country cookin'" quite like blood laced with heroin.
So the slutty girlfriend calls her sister and two of her stoner friends to brainstorm about how they can help Herschell. "It's really weird, like in Star Trek or the Twilight Zone," she tells them, and worse, they now have to find enough drugs to feed his voracious appetite, because Pat Paulsen hooked him on super-addictive weed. "That bastard!" they say. "The only thing he was ever good for was he had some drugs. It's all we can do to scrounge up enough drugs to supply this guy's habit." Setting aside the logical quagmire implied by their attitude toward their drug dealer, they resolve that the best way to help Herschell is to kill him.
Later, the slutty girlfriend goes to hang out with the drug pusher again, bringing new meaning to the word "ambivalence." She decides to take a nap on his bed in a half naked state, and when his supplier shows up with some inventory, he offers to let the guy rape her in exchange for the drugs. What follows is a baffling sequence of shots, with the drug dealer fondling her breasts, Herschell gobbling somewhere outside, the dealer reacting to Herschell with alarm even though he's not in the room, then fleeing to a warehouse. He hides in a tool shop, which coincidentally is where Herschell is waiting (even though he was just shown walking around outside). He discovers his error too late, and Herschell throws him on a table and saws off his leg. This is a memorable moment, because the guy playing the drug dealer is obviously an amputee, and they're able to linger over fake blood pouring out of his leg stump for a good fifteen seconds or so. Herschell dines.
After sawing off the guy's leg, Herschell walks out into a field, falls to his knees, and begins praying for salvation. Five seconds later, the slutty girlfriend's stoner friends walk up behind him and lop off his head with a machete. Cut to a real turkey being decapitated, then flopping around for a minute or so, followed by a table of hippies ripping meat from a roasted turkey, next to Herschell's severed head.
I won't give away the ending, but suffice it to say it's the only thing dumber than "the butler did it." Then cigarette guy returns to sum up:
There's much to warn us all of the trends our destinies take. Our scientists agree that the one immutable law of life is change. There's much talk and protests about everything - about pollution - about drugs and their abuse - and this has been a story based partly on fact, partly on probability. But the horrors that occur in the minds of those who allow the indiscrimianate use of the human body as a mixing bowl for drugs and chemicals are as real as the real horror. So when you eat or take into your body any chemical or drugs, you take a chance on reactions that are untested, unpredictable. There are government agencies and many responsible groups fighting the use of chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink, and yet there are far too many of us who go right on taking the good way of life for granted, ignoring the warnings, so let's give a little thought to making our own story have a happy ending.
Toward the end of this, I kid you not, the guy breaks into a coughing fit, practically hacking up pieces of lung while still taking drags on his cigarette.
I really can't recommend a movie more highly. This is one of those movies you'll hold in reserve for special occasions, when friends and family come over and you want to completely fuck with their heads. I humbly award Blood Freak the first "Five Waldo" rating, and I do this without hesitation.
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