Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)

Starring Jason Yachanin, Kate Graham, Allyson Sereboff, Robin Watkins, Joshua Olatunde, Rose Ghavami, Caleb Emerson, Lloyd Kaufman, Khalid Rivera

Directed By Lloyd Kaufman

Believe me, I tried. I tried really hard to mentally prepare myself to brave another Troma film. I am in love with the gaudy trash that Lloyd Kaufman spews out there to his deranged audience. But god damn, every film manages to outdo the others before it in terms of bedrock tastelessness and unadulterated offensiveness. I thought I could hang with the big guns this time around, but within the first five minutes a drooling axe murderer is caught slapping his cock around while a zombie hand shoots out of the ground and straight up his ass… That just told me instantly that I was doomed.

When a fried chicken franchise restaurant is built on top of Tromaville’s Indian burial ground, the product begins coming to life. A gang of lesbian protesters demonstrate in front of the franchise, carrying signs with sayings like “Fuck Tibet, free the chickens!” When they are tricked into eating the tainted poultry, well, I bet you can figure out what happens next…

To say that Poultrygeist is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in years is an understatement. I’ve always considered Peter Jackson’s early films to be the milestone in terms of truly twisted moviemaking, but the unbelievable shit that the Troma team has cooked up this time had me hooting and hollering like, well, a possessed zombie chicken. I mean it, just when you think you’ve seen everything, this film manages to up the ante and throw something else even more unbelievably profane and disgusting up there. There were about 20 times in this film I told myself, “Aw man, there is no way they are going there,” only to see them, yes… go there. If you think a grown man committing acts of bestiality to a raw chicken carcass is about the worst thing you’ve ever had to witness on a movie screen, then Lucy, you should see where this scene goes only seconds later.

Am I wrong to have enjoyed something so deliberately ugly and perverse so much? If there’s one thing Lloyd Kaufman does extremely well, it is to lure the viewer into accepting his degenerate vision, and in fact, revel in it. How can you not feel charmed by a fun musical number set to a lesbian sex-scene? Or a gay Mexican who gets stuffed into a meat grinder only to come back to life as a zombie sandwich? These are the kinds of weird ideas that we all would love to see realized on screen, whether we come to terms with it or not. I mean, you can have your thumb up your ass analyzing the layers of meaning in The Seventh Seal all day long, but at the end of the day what you really want to see are a bunch of projectile vomiting zombie chickens tearing apart customers with butcher knives, admit it.

There is really no need to delve deep into plot this time, because plot is only there to string together all of the fantastic stuff you can dream up involving blood, guts, boobs, shit, and bodily fluids. What I have to truly admire is that amidst the chaos, the film does offer a pretty sharp satire on not only the corporate greed of the fast food industry, but also the extremists that protest their establishments. Yes, this is Troma we’re talking about, so nobody is off limits, just ask the retarded kid in the wheelchair that gets turned into a zombie chicken, or the six-year-old girl guzzling beer in the backseat of a station wagon. We love Troma for the same reasons we love punk rock, because they do the shit that everybody wants to, but nobody dares to.

Listen, this isn’t Citizen Kane we’re dealing with here and not everything in this movie works. But every joke that falls flat is made up for by scenes of carnage, singing, and fornication so twisted that you can’t help but watch in awe at the sheer audacity of it all.

I would recommend this film to anybody who enjoys fried chicken, hates fried chicken, lesbians, zombie fans, Muslims, Christians, the obese, the elderly, diabetics, and pretty much everybody else. This film is guaranteed to elicit a response. It just may not be one that agrees with you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KQCX0zNdyc