Review XXV - Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Review XXV
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)

I'd like to just give a little warning before I start this review. This film is, well, gory, but most of all, contains pretty explicitively provocative scenes. Watch it at your own risk!

Two years ago, for whatever reason, I was inspired to watch some real obscure, weird films with a friend. We got started on the list, but after watching Une vraie jeune fille, we abandoned the project. There were a couple of films I had downloaded to watch, and one of them was the musical, comedy, horror, just plain strange Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, directed by Lloyd Kaufman. Since it's almost Halloween, I figured it was time to watch this so I could have at least one review on here that was horror-related. The film was produced and distributed by an independent film company, Troma Entertainment, and apparently, Poultrygeist was their highest critical acclaim. Let me just say that I'm wondering just how weird and bad the films they've released are. The film stars Jason Yachanin, Kate Graham, Joshua Olatunde, Rose Ghavami, Allyson Sereboff, Caleb Emerson, and Robin L. Watkins. If you actually know any of these actors, I'm proud of you! ... Or maybe just horrified.

The film opens up to Arbie (Jason Yachanin) and his girlfriend, Wendy (Kate Graham), about to have sex for the first time in a Native American burial ground as they are just about to graduate from high school and since Wendy is about to leave for college, why not? As they have sex, a zombie reaches through the ground and is about to prey on them before a man interrupts the couple. Arbie and Wendy run off, and the man is completely ripped apart by the zombie. Cue title card! A semester later, Arbie finds his girlfriend has abandoned him for another girl, Micki (Allyson Sereboff), and the two are part of a group condemning the establishment of a new fast food restaurant, American Chicken Bunker, on the Native American burial ground. In order to get back at Wendy (and to win her over somehow), Arbie applies to work at A.C.B. However, weirdness insues when the chicken product seems to be possessed by the spirits of the burial ground and everyone becomes a chicken zombie. You can't get better writing than this!

I'm pretty sure I found this movie while looking up something on Ron Jeremy (no link for your own good). He makes an appearance in the film right at the beginning, and I think that can sum up the film as a whole - Ron Jeremy makes a cameo. Do I even need to continue? ... Yes? Fine. If the film was just about chicken zombies, I think I would have enjoyed it more. Instead, we get a mash of really sexual innuendos all the time, as well as just sex scenes, minus the unsimulated bit. Not to mention the rest of the humour is really crass. Now, I don't frown upon crass humour, but in this film, it's not even done well. Sometimes I'd laugh, but there were so many parts where I'd just groan out loud because the joke was bad. I'll give you an example, just for the heck of it. Humus (Rose Ghavami), who is a Muslim woman who wears a red burqa, witnesses the murder of the gay Mexican worker, Jose Paco Bell (Khalid Rivera), by a piece of chicken who turns on a chicken shredder machine and pushes Paco in. Obviously blood is sprayed everywhere, and the owner of the franchise, General Lee Roy (Robin Watkins), tells Humus and the manager, Denny (Joshua Olatunder), (in case you didn't notice it already, the names of all the main characters are a reference to fast food restaurants) to keep their mouths shut about the incident. Denny and General Lee Roy leave, and Humus says, after looking at the blood sprayed everything, "That reminds me - I need a tampon." Now, I've watched bad movies with bad lines, but lines like these are hard to come by - fortunately. I don't know why I'm even complaining - the movie is called Poultrygeist. I guess maybe I just hoped that there would be more decent writing in the film. Like I said, there are some good lines in the film (mostly the racist remarks, to be honest), but most of the time they're ruined by an obvious line followed from another character. I know it's a mock film on horror films, but some things are forgivable, and others are sins. The writing in this film is a sin and it doesn't deserve any chance to make amends.

However, even though the writing is horrible, the characters are mostly just airheads, and the film is walking on thin ice in relation to those sex scenes, there is one thing that the film has that I totally loved - the gore effects. I've watched low budget films, and most of the time, the gore effects were really lame. However, this film does really well in this department. The pulsating eggs were awesome when they exploded with green slime, and the chicken zombies and bloody explosions were pretty cool. I'm going to ruin a scene again, sorry, but it totally deserves recognition. A notable fat man, Jared, goes to the restaurant and orders a "low-fat" meal. He takes a bite out of a zombie chicken egg and proceeds to have, best way to describe it, the shits. That whole scene is gross as, well, poop, but it's well done. When the man inside Jared (don't ask because the film doesn't even know) breaks free, I thought that was really well done - especially considering it was a low budget film.

I'd give the film three point five stars on ten. The writing was terrible, and the plot was just really gross most of the time. It didn't rely on anything but petty humour and sex, and the only part of the film that gives it that three point five is the well done gore. Still, it's hard to sit through an hour and a half of bad plot when there isn't the one thing that makes it good: constant explosions of goo. Don't even bother looking this one up - it's really not worth your time - unless you happen to like racist-fart-joke-sex-filled-chicken-zombie-infested films.