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…
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.
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.