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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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6
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10 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Fashioned
with a 'one take only' philosophy that makes Ed Wood look like
Stanley Kubrick, Blood Freak is,
in a word, in-freakin'-credible. I've seen my share of
really bad movies but this one's a stunner. It's undeniably
unique: an anti-drug gore film with a pro-Christian message,
featuring a homicidal monster with the body of a man and the
head of a turkey. He murders dope addicts to drink their blood,
the only way he can satisfy his own chemical-induced addiction.
Frankly, the flick left me completely stupefied when I wasn't
cackling with uncontrolled mirth. Before experiencing this one-of-a
kind horror I'd have normally refused to accept its very existence.
After all... why in God's name would anyone make such a thing?
What would possess them to? But seeing is believing.
A beefy nomadic biker dude with an Elvis 'do named Herschell
(co-director Steve Hawkes) plays the Good Samaritan when he
helps a pretty woman named Angel (Heather Hughes) with car trouble.
He escorts her back to the house she shares with her foxy sister
Ann (Dana Cullivan), where a pot party is in full swing. Though
Angel is a scripture-quoting Christian, Ann is a party animal
druggie with a brain the size of a walnut. She offers Herschell
a little ganja but he seems more interested in Angel's views
on God. Rebuffing Ann's advances, he accepts Angel's offer to
let him crash at their house while he looks for a job. A friend
of Angel's who runs a turkey farm offers Herschell a job starting
the following week.
Which gives Ann more than enough time to
work her wiles. She may be dumb as a box of rocks but she's
a looker. Herschell doesn't really stand a chance. Soon Ann
has him tokin' the Devil Weed and tumbling into bed with her.
Trouble is, the pot she gave him is a particularly potent variety
that has him hooked in no time. (Oh, say about 10 minutes.)
Later, when Herschell reports for his first day at work, he
finds out his new job is as a human guinea pig testing chemically
altered turkey meat. The turkey farm scientists assure him it's
perfectly safe to consume and offer to fix him up with some
primo drugs to boot. Herschell tucks into his new job with gusto,
eating most of a cooked bird without so much as a side dollop
of mashed potatoes or even anything to drink. Afterwards he
starts to feel sick, passing out in a field. When he wakes up,
Herschell is a new man one with a gigantic turkey head made
out of papier-mβchι and a thirst for blood. He kidnaps a couple
of female heroin junkies, hangs them upside down from a ladder,
then slices open their throats to (rather sloppily) drink the
arterial spray... which, in the case of the 1st victim, actually
jets out of her shirt rather than her neck. He also strangles
an old man who witnesses one of the murders. Then he kills a
relative of the old man, a fat, beer-bellied redneck, who attacks
him in revenge. A regretful Ann, horrified by her boyfriend's
condition, enlists a couple of hippy stoners to try to help
poor Herschell by supplying him with drugs. He ends up undermining
their efforts by cutting off the leg of a drug dealer with a
buzz saw. All throughout these nonsensical proceedings a chain-smoking
on-camera narrator (co-director Brad Grinter, reading from a
script on his desk) occasionally chimes in, failing miserably
at tying it all together. And would you believe it? the thing
actually has a happy ending!
Made for about ten dollars tops, Blood
Freak is an incredibly stupid,
completely inept piece of... er, filmmaking which by
no sane law of the universe should even exist. But it does,
and hardcore cheese lovers will want to seek it out for precisely
that reason. It's just staggering how bad this movie
is! It amusingly stumbles right out of the gate, repeating both
the title and "Starring Steve Hawkes" twice within the
span of a few minutes. The plot makes no sense, continuity is
thrown to winds, and it looks to have been edited by Helen Keller.
There's no point in critiquing the acting because there just
isn't any to speak of. The attempt at a Christian message is
apparently sincere, yet it throws in messy gore effects and
even a brief shot of Ann's bare backside. The murder scenes
are hysterical, especially the dismemberment of the drug dealer
(apparently played by a guy with only one leg in real life)...
Clutching the bleeding plastic stump, he screams at the top
of his lungs for a full minute before expiring. The film's one
attempt at an action sequence, the attack by the vengeful redneck,
will leave you slack-jawed in utter astonishment. (For a fat
guy he vaults that fence quite nimbly.) If you think you've
seen the absolute dregs of American Z-grade schlock cinema (The
Creeping Terror, Manos: The Hands
of Fate, The Mighty Gorga,
etc.) but haven't yet experienced Blood
Freak, I'm confident that the world's
only "Turkey-Monster-Anti-Drug-Pro-Jesus Gore film" should provide
you with an entirely new perspective. Fans of 'So Bad They're
Good' flicks will definitely want to gobble this 'un up
though it certainly helps if you're blitzed when you watch it.
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Something
Weird Video continues its tradition of bringing super-obscure
cult flicks to DVD, supplemented with a host of gonzo extras.
As for the main feature, Blood
Freak was a dirt cheap
production to begin with
not exactly Film Preservation Society material
so naturally it's not going to look or sound as good as a mainstream
Hollywood film or even the product of 'lesser' studios like Hammer
or AIP. It's actually rather amazing that the movie has survived
more or less intact over the past 30 years. A/V quality is mediocre
at best. There's quite a bit of print damage; it's grainy and
dark to boot. (One scene, in fact, is so dark that for a few minutes
virtually nothing can be seen at all. I'd bet it looked that way
when the flick was new, however.) Sound is somewhat muffled, something
to be expected with a film this poorly made to begin with.
As is their practice,
the folks at SWV really pile on the extras in compensation. Nine
schlock movie trailers are provided, all but one with 'Blood'
themes: Blood Feast, Color
Me Blood Red, The Blood Spattered
Bride, Bloody Pit of Horror,
The Dorm That Dripped Blood, I
Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin,
and Night of the Bloody Apes,
in addition to the promo for Blood
Freak. Flesh
Feast is thrown in for good measure, since it was directed
by Blood
Freak's co-helmer (and
butt-puffing narrator) Brad Grinter. Now I positively love trailers;
Something Weird rarely disappoints in this regard. But they've
also included no less than six short subjects, all related in
some way to Blood
Freak's peculiar vibe.
First up is The
Walls Have Eyes, a 28-minute segment from that 1969 film.
In it, a perverted motel manager gets his jollies spying on a
druggie couple doing the nasty; Blood
Freak star Steve Hawkes
is the low-rent lothario. Despite the sordid subject matter it's
boring as hell and easily skipped. Next is Brad Grinter, Nudist
(excerpted from a 1970 sexploitation flick), featuring Grinter
as a swinging TV anchorman who introduces a coworker (Scum
of the Earth's William Kerwin) and his spouse to the joys
of the nudist camp lifestyle. Trust me... you'll see way, WAY
more of Grinter and friends than you'd ever really care to. (Yikes!)
Beggar at the Gates is a truncated documentary (originally
aired on PBS) that takes a serious look at various forms of organized
religion in America, from fundamentalist Protestants to New Age
pagans. It's pretty dry but does have minor freak appeal
some of the folks we're shown are kind of odd. (Alas, no snake
handlers.) The turkey theme is further explored with A Day
of Thanksgiving, a trip through Eisenhower-era family values
via an old black and white Centron educational short, and Turkeys
in the Wild, a 1962 nature documentary that's actually as
interesting as it is corny. By far the most entertaining of the
shorts is Narcotics: Pit of Despair, an anti-drug screed
from 1967. Here we follow the downward spiral of a high school
kid (Emergency's Kevin Tighe) who falls in with the wrong
crowd, to his eternal regret. He winds up hooked on drugs by a
former classmate turned pusher, a guy who looks like Tom Hanks
in an Abraham Lincoln beard! Horrendous fashions and goofy dancing
aside, the deadpan Dragnet-style narration provides a number
of real kneeslappers. ("Forget it, man, and get with the countdown.
Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.")
On top of all
these trimmings, the disc
also comes with a still gallery of horror comic book cover art
(set to the rockin' strains of The Dead Elvi), liner notes by
Travis Crawford, and a cute, easily located Easter Egg on the
Main Menu screen. Gobble gobble, ya'll!
12/27/02 |
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