Blood Freak April 24th, 2010
Originally Written 10/28/02
Once I’d heard of Blood Freak I knew I must see it. It’s a story of a bodybuilder/motorcylcist, Hirshel, who looks like a cross between Elvis and Mitchell (from another bad movie of the same name), who meets up with a woman on the Florida turnpike. She takes him back to her house where her younger sister is having a party with a bunch of druggies.
The older sister is into religion and doesn’t approve, and rambles out a bunch of random bible verses to demonstrate that.Hirshel is acting all straight-laced and interested in the “good” sister, but then gets seduced by the bad sister and after taking a few hits on one suped-up joint he’s instantly hooked and turns into a raging pot fiend.
He also gets a job at a local poultry farm and for a little extra cash agrees to be a test subject and eat turkey meat that’s been treated with experimental chemicals, it’s all for FDA testing of course, so how bad could it be? He has a bad reaction and after lying on the ground and shaking for what feels like 20 minutes of screen time, he mutates into a hideous half-turkey monster, well more actually a guy with a turkey mask on his head. He then rambles around the night, stalking junkies to kill and slurp up their blood to get his fix. He also goes after a pusher whose done his woman wrong and works him over with a band saw…
Now from the description the movie sounds deliciously bad, but unfortunately as the Huey Lewis song goes, “sometimes bad is bad.” The movie was one stinky turkey, litteraly. It reminded me a lot of an MST3K movie, Manos: The Hands of Fate, it had many of the same qualities, bad camera work, shaky footage, out-of-focus shots, poorly-lit images, muddy audio, incomprehensible, boring dialog, people reading off of cue cards, etc. The pacing of the film was really laborious too.
Okay, we get the fact that he’s on a bike, you don’t need to show us every mile he rides. Oh good, show him going through the toll booth, that’s good cinema. Yes, we understand he’s at the poultry farm, we saw the sign, you don’t need to film him turning off the main road and going all the way up the driveway. Then to further show us, the director proceeded to leave the camera running on shots of turkeys and cornish hens milling about for long stretches.
There was no music score either, so it got pretty painful. The gore sequences were kind of funny for how innept they were. There was one scene of a woman screaming and they just looped her scream so as Jeff put it, she sounded like a car alarm going off. Then in another shot a guy was attacking the turkey man, he stabbed the turkey in one of his eyes, then the turkey pulled out the knife and stabbed the guy. For both characters’ screams, the audio was the same.
The ultra layer of cheese on the film was how it was one of those scared-straight productions, a horror equivalent of Refer Madness. It was all done to show the evils of drugs and reckless living. As one reviewer described it on Amazon, “it’s the worlds only anti-pot, pro Jesus, monster movie.” Every few scenes the camera would cut to this narrator sitting in an audience who’d spout some philosophical tripe, obviously reading from a cue card of course.
What made things even more ironic was how he was going on against how bad drugs were all the while he was smoking a cigarrette. During his last preachy segment he kept on caughing, more and more, so that might have actually been some subtle irony on the director’s part, but given how bad the rest of the movie was, I hesitate to give the guy that much credit.I’m not sure if this was the absolutely worst movie I’ve ever seen, as I’ve seen a lot of stinkers, but this is up near the top of the list.
The rest of the disc had some amusing extra features, such as trailers for a bunch of other trashy films, and a few shorts as well. One of those was about a sleazy motel owenr who spied on pretty girls through a one-way mirror, filming them as they repeatedly put on and took off fancy underwear and rolled arojnd on the bed nude. We had to fast-forward through that one it was so painful.
Then there was another amusing little story about a guy who gets his frigid wife to get over her embarassment of being seen naked by going to a nudist friends’ backyard picnic, complete with nude tenis and twister. Heh, I couldn’t tell if the movie was actually trying to be genuine or was there for seedy peeping. Just plain goofy.