November 27th, 2003
Today's grab bag is a special treat for The Graveyard's American readers as we're serving up three movies (that are loosely based on the holiday) to watch after you've stuffed yourself full of all the fixin's and are hankering for a little bit of horror "desert".
A motorbike riding Vietnam Vet (played by Stephen Hawkes, who co-wrote this - pardon the expression - turkey) gets a job on a poultry farm, smokes a handful of weed (with the usual exaggerated effects) and eventually chows down on an experimental turkey that soon transforms him into (insert menacing music here) a turkey-headed monster that lusts human blood! Yeah, this one must be seen to be believed. I've never since found a movie so "out there" and inept at the same time. If you're a believer that there's not much worse out there to be found after five Air Bud movies and a little piece of crap I like to call, Corky Romano - then feast your eyes on this.
Included here because the entire events take place during a Thanksgiving celebration - an escaped mental paitent goes to a family gathering on Turkey Day and proceeds to kill everyone off - this is certainly not a good film either. But I still do dig the pre-credits sequence that has our killer choking someone to death, shooting a needle into his tongue and running over an old lady in a car and it's always funny to see the killer who resembles a nutty Lou Ferrigno. See if you can make it through the whole thing or if you'll just give in to the tiredness that's sure to assault you if you eat too much turkey.
A group of college students head off to an ancient indian burial ground only for them to start getting slaughtered when one of the students is possessed by a pissed-off native spirit. And if you've seen 1994's Savage Harvest, it's certainly easy to see where it ripped it's plot off from. For a Ray film this is fairly ambitious and despite a bunch of continuity flaws and general feeling of cheapness it's at least an entertaining time with okay deaths and some okay mild thrills. . |
Blood Freak [1971] is probably the only movie in existence (and probably will always be) in which the main killer is a turkey-headed beast. Plus the fact this is hilariously bad also adds to the "so bad, it's good" enjoyment on hand.
Home Sweet Home [1981] is a product of the slasher glut that flooded the horror genre after the success of Friday The 13th. That's to say it's a really badly done effort that seems rushed out just so the producers could cash-in before the "fad" passed (which it eventually did before seeing a resurgence in 1996 after Scream hit it big).
Scalps [1983] is one of Fred Olen Ray's lesser known movies. Made just after he did, The Alien Dead, this slasher flick actually doesn't turn out too badly.