Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) Fast Food Satire From Uncle Lloyd

If you've been reading my humble blog for any amount of time, it's pretty obvious I enjoy movies with energy and vitality. Budget be damned. Sometimes, taste and logic be damned. If it's got that spark, and that spark lights something in my little brain, I'm going to enjoy it.

Many, many years ago, in my college-years job in a video store (sadly I did not go on to direct Reservoir Dogs), I took home a cute little film called The Toxic Avenger, and thus my love and respect for Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment began.  I remember The Toxic Avenger as this wild, energetic, tasteless, and hilarious presentation of a whole new kind of superhero, and an introduction to a whole new style of filmmaking, at least to my eyes in 1989.


I tend to be a late bloomer sometimes with certain things, it seems, and I only saw Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead in the spring of 2011.  Hey, better late than never.  I'd heard about the movie through other horror fans, other horror bloggers.  I was intrigued, and not having seen a Troma film in longer than I should admit, it was due time to revisit the energy I sensed from that first viewing in 1989.


What I got was a goofy, oddball, delightfully tasteless, ultra-gory, naughty, toe-tapping semi-musical slam on the big target of the fast food industry that I couldn't help but like more and more as it went along.  It's about fresh-faced Arbie (Jason Yachanin) hoping for one last night of shenanigans with his high school sweetheart Wendy (Kate Graham), and hoping for a promise that they'd always be together.  When the college semester ends, Arbie returns home to find the local Indian burial ground has been cemented over, with a fast-food chicken franchise built callously over the now-empty graves.  Not only that, he finds that Wendy has taken to sexually experimenting with Micki (Allyson Sereboff), the leader of a large protest group taking issue with the new restaurant, seemingly forgetting their promise.  Upset, Arbie rebels by taking a job at the new American Chicken Bunker and becomes their new "counter girl," complete with tutu.  It's there that Arbie meets his strange co-workers, including manager Denny (Joshua Olantude), Hummus (Rose Ghavami), Paco Bell (Khalid Rivera), Carl Jr. (Caleb Emerson), owner and main villain General Lee Roy (Robin Watkins), and Old Arbie (director Lloyd Kaufman), who may be a future version of the younger Arbie...phew!  Lots of people, lots of fun.

What follows is the inevitable merging of the angry Native American spirits and countless chickens, as everyone who consumes the food from American Chicken Bunker turns into a chicken-beaked, violent zombie-demon-thing possessing super-human strength and a thirst for blood and regular human flesh.  The restaurant becomes an abattoir as people are horribly, and often hilariously, dispatched in increasingly gory ways that only a Troma film can deliver.  Arbie and Wendy have to overcome betrayal (turns out Micki and the General were working together the whole time) and overwhelming odds to not only survive, but get a little girl they've rescued out and to freedom.

Peppered with catchy songs with very explicit lyrics, buckets of blood (and other things probably best left unmentioned), boundaries-of-taste-pushing gags, cameos (like Ron Jeremy's "Crazy Ron"), and a crazy energy, Poultrygeist is pure Troma fun in the classic vein.  It harks back to movies like the aforementioned Toxic Avenger.  The acting is hammy and over-the-top, but in a Troma film, that's how it should be.  Jason Yachanin is an awkward and likable hero, and Graham is sexy and cute all in the same breath - the leads head a cast that's obviously having a ball doing this insane little movie. It's definitely no secret that Lloyd Kaufman is a champion of small, independent films - he's like a father figure to many aspiring and established horror film folk.  Yeah, some of these films might not be for everyone, or to everyone's taste.  That's okay.  I've said it before:  we all have unique tastes that really shouldn't be put down.

So if you like Poultrygeist, hold your head up high and steer clear of the chicken.

Until next time, enjoy this trailer that...well, may be offensive to some, but if you're reading a horror blog, something tells me you're not offended by much.  And hey, I picked the least offensive trailer I could find!  Enjoy...

Musical Horror: "Murder Ballads" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

When I'm flying up above the zombie hordes, I like a little music to keep me from going insane. Well, more insane than I already am. I'm pretty easy when it comes to music. I stand firmly in the rock genre, but I can handle anything from electronica to ambient to classic country to mambo. If it sounds good to me, it's good to me.

One of my favorite CD's in my collection might actually fall in the genre of horror. Let's see: killer kids, jealous lover killers, hitchhiker killers, guns, knives, rocks...all on one CD. All on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' amazing 1996 release, Murder Ballads. Murder ballads are story-songs about crimes of passion, but Cave and his crew expand past passion and dive right into madness as well.

"Song of Joy" kicks off the festivities with a song about a wandering man who finds himself at the door of a stranger, looking for a place to sleep. The man relates his tragic, horrifying story, one about his sullen wife and children whom he loved dearly. One night, he returns home to find them horribly murdered with the words "HIS RED RIGHT HAND" scrawled in blood on the wall. To me, there's something about this dude that's not registering right. Are you beckoning me in? I don't know...I leave it to your interpretation.

"Stagger Lee" is actually an old legend made into different versions of blues songs, about the murder of William "Billy" Lyons by Stagger Lee Shelton (read more about it here). Cave spares no description; this is not a song you play for your grandma. Massive profanity and wanton violence are set against the minimal music that suggests quite strongly what Stagger will do in certain...ahem...situations.

"Henry Lee" is one of the most beautiful songs not only on this album, but in my opinion. Cave brings in P. J. Harvey to sing the female lead about a young man who tries to let his illicit lover down easy. She has other ideas and stabs him to death with a pen knife before throwing his body into a well. Never has bloody mayhem sounded so gorgeous. Lie there, lie there, little Henry Lee/'Til the flesh drops from your bones/For the girl that you have in that merry green land/Can wait forever for you to come home. Brrr...shivers.



"Lovely Creature" describes what might best be a ghost story. A man travels with a beautiful woman, who accompanies him through the night. By the time the man makes it home, she's gone, but he's sure she still out there somewhere, or as Cave puts it: Somewhere she lies, this lovely creature/Beneath the slow drifting sands/With her hair full of ribbons/And green gloves on her hands.

"Where The Wild Roses Grow" is another beautiful song featuring the ethereal voice of Kylie Minogue. Yes, Kylie Minogue. I'm totally serious. One would think she didn't fit here, but she is perfect in the role of Eliza Day, the object of affection of Cave's character. Remember how in the film "Frankenstein," the Monster developed that child-like logic of "beautiful things belong in the water"? Yeah, something like that happens here, but it ain't child-like: And I kissed her goodbye/Said all beauty must die/And lent down and planted a rose between her teeth. This comes after Eliza Day makes this observation: On the third day he took me to the river/He showed me the roses and we kissed/And the last thing I heard was a muttered word/As he knelt above me with a rock in his fist. Yeah, not really the ideal date, you know.



"The Curse of Millhaven" is a cheeky little story-song told from the point of view of Loretta (but she prefers Lottie), a strong-willed girl who lives in the town of Millhaven, where chaos is throwing the little place into a tizzy. Murders, disappearances, vandalism...someone's causing the good people of Millhaven to panic. Lottie doesn't seem to mind much about it all...probably because she's the one behind it all. It's a darkly humorous peek into the insanity of a 15-year-old girl.

"The Kindness Of Strangers" features the poor young girl Mary Bellows. All she wants is to travel to the ocean, and she accepts a ride from a man named Richard Slade. They stop at a hotel, and she lays down her boundaries right away. She tells Slade she's a "good girl" and that she can't possibly "permit him in." He "tips his hat" and goes to his room, but the situation is left sadly open when this happens: She sat on her bed and thought of home/With the sea breeze whistling all alone/O poor Mary Bellows/In hope and loneliness she crossed the floor/And undid the latch on the front door/O poor Mary Bellows/They found her the next day cuffed to the bed/A rag in her mouth and a bullet in her head/O poor Mary Bellows. Damn.

"Crow Jane" is about a legendary woman who lives near a town called New Haven and whose mind crawls and squirms with violence and vengeance. She gets a hold of several guns and as the song progresses, the population of New Haven drops from 48 to 28. People, do not piss off that nasty woman who lives alone down by the river.

"O'Malley's Bar" clocks in at just over 14 minutes and is a true story-song in all its gory, blood-soaked glory. It's a true descent into madness as a man - the main character telling the story - walks into O'Malley's Bar, which is full of familiar townsfolk just enjoying a beer. The man calmly begins shooting everyone he can, describing it in full detail. He relays what he sees, how he feels. He imagines himself as some kind of Angel of Death, that he has an absolute divine right to murder innocent people. It's unflinching.

"Death Is Not The End" is the lone "bright" spot in the entire CD. After the extreme mayhem of the last song, this cover of a Bob Dylan song basically tells the listener not to worry, not to fret, and that truly, "death is not the end." It features everyone on the CD, including Shane MacGowan of The Pogues, singing a verse, much like the end of a somber play. At this point, you want to throw flowers, but might be too depressed to do so.

I absolutely love this entire offering. Yeah, it's violent and it's depressing and it's unabashedly brutal. But they're stories. They're murder ballads, and they aren't meant to be about unicorns and jellybeans. It's not everyone's cup of tea - I have some friends that may pass out during "Song Of Joy" - but it's well-crafted, scary music.

It's a slasher film for your ears.

Until next time from the skies, keep rocking.

Personal Zombie Soundtrack

So, to entertain myself, I often create themed CD's. Nothing new, I know. I've got ones ranging from 80's hair metal to music I envision being played in a strip club to songs you don't expect to blast out of my stereo's speakers (like William Shatner's rendition of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"). One of the most obvious ones someone like me would create sits firmly in my player right now: a zombie mix.

Now, outside of the WGON Helicopter site, I'm writing a story that is zombie-themed. The idea for it came many years ago, well before the first remake of Dawn of the Dead, and it started as a script. It's still in its first draft as a novel, and hovering around 450 pages. My talkative side came out in my writing, so my editing side must step in for the second draft. While writing this story - hell, while writing any story - I turned to music to help me build scenes or moods. The right song can put me emotionally in the story, which hopefully reflects to the reader. For most of the actual story writing, I listened to dark ambient music on WinAmp. It had that minimal, forboding structure that wasn't distracting, but added to said mood. But there are some other songs I had in my possession that I put on a disc that could be seen as a "soundtrack" to the story. Each song gave me images that ended up in the story, whether as they originally came to me, or in edited form.

See? Talkative. I've gone on long enough with the setup. Let me delve into the songs and maybe a little about each one.

Track 1 - L'Alba Dei Morti Viventi by Goblin - The main theme of the original "Dawn of the Dead" works here, too. Spooky and plodding - watch the movie again, and you'll feel it, too.

Track 2 - Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums by A Perfect Circle - I could see the contagion spreading to this song. It's relentless, and I imagine the disease would be the same.

Track 3 - End Of The World by Cold - "...when everyone else got sick." Kind of fits, I think. It's the end of the world, and they can do nothing about it. Plus, it has a thunderclap as a sound effect, which always gets me.

Track 4 - Forgiven by Within Temptation - I really fell for Within Temptation's music during this. This song is tremendously sad, and works in a scene that was heartbreaking to write. Someone close to the main character falls victim to the disease, and begins his cycle of guilt. "You gave up the fight/you left me behind/all that's done's forgiven" and "I watched the clouds drifting away/still the sun can't warm my face." Brrrr! Chills. I had to put my hero through hell, though.

Track 5 - Escape From Hellview by CKY - OK, this song really doesn't fit in the story, and I'm positive it's not about zombies, but it just put me in a rock-n-roll zombie type of mindset.

Track 6 - Alcohulin' Ass by HELLYEAH - Somewhere in the story, this fits. I see a set of travelers, brandishing guns and assorted weapons, on an open road for what may be their only rest as they drive.

Track 7 - Falling Again by Lacuna Coil - "I'm here, another day is gone/I don't want to die/please be there when I arrive/don't cry...please." There's a sad pleading which goes with what some of the characters feel. Hey, they don't want to die, and the way they're there for each other ranges from sweet to downright ewwww.

Track 8 - Say My Name by Within Temptation - Another Within Temptation song, yes. The lyrics might not seem to match what I'm writing, but I just see the way the music builds as key. When the guitars really kick in, two of my characters realize their rushed feelings for each other are just fine.

Track 9 - S.O.S. (Anything But Love) by Apocalyptica featuring Christina Scabbia) - Two characters develop a seriously dysfunctional relationship. She falls for douchebags, and he is one. The poor girl's feelings are played upon by more than one person in this story, and it gets to be too much.

Track 10 - Pretender by James Labrie - This is just pure gun-firing action. I just see this as one of the "let's get the hell out of here" carnage scenes.

Track 11 - Knights of Cydonia by Muse - Let me just preface by saying, I love this song. It has cheesy elements. It may not fit perfectly into this story, but the bombastic heroism of the song would highlight any zombie soundtrack! Guitar riff partway through = the hero(es) kick ass.

Track 12 - Join Me In Death by HIM - The love metal band had to make it on here somewhere. There's a sad scene featuring a bit of an explosion where we say goodbye to a couple characters. Kind of fits there.

Track 13 - The Host of Seraphim by Dead Can Dance - Oh, man, does this song just drip with a haunting sadness. You may have heard it towards the end of the film "The Mist." I see it just after the story loses half its cast, and the survivors not only have to see it, but have to deal with it in the moments afterward.

Track 14 - In This River by Black Label Society - Little metal ballad to wind it down. Hero finally breaks down after everything - he'll need his friends, his fellow survivors right about now.

Honorable mention: Doomsday by Murray Gold - This piece from the Doctor Who episode of the same name was amazingly haunting during that show. I can see it as the final song played as the characters ride towards their final fate - is it safe, or is it zombie-filled? There's a trace of hope in the song, but it's still forboding.

There you have it. There are other songs that didn't make the cut, but they're quite good, too. I think many of you might have other songs which could make a zombie soundtrack that I hadn't even thought of or heard. Please share 'em with me! I'm always open to new stuff.

In the meantime, enjoy some music and remember to be careful of corners when running from the bitey people.