Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)


Directed by: Lloyd Kaufman

Starring: Jason Yachanin, Kate Graham, Robin Watkins, and Rose Ghavami

Other actors of note: Lloyd Kaufman

Plot: When the American Chicken Bunker, a military-themed fried-chicken chain, builds a restaurant on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, local protesters aren't the only ones crying fowl! The previous tenants, fueled by a supernatural force, take "possession" of the food and those who eat it, and the survivors discover that they must band together before they themselves become the other white meat! Film lovers have been starved for sustenance. The relentless diet of predictability and pretense Hollywood has been serving up just doesn't cut it. Poultrygeist is hearty food for thought. In Poultrygeist, Troma takes on the the fast-food industry-skewering the soulless restaurateurs-in the world's first horror-comedy film to feature zombie chickens, American Indians and a bit of singing and dancing! It's Poultrygeist! Taken from Troma Entertainment.

Premarital graveyard sex, always a good decision.

In the world of cheesy highly offensive bad taste horror films, nobody does them quite like Troma pictures and director Lloyd Kauffman. "Poultrygeist" takes us back to the city of Tromaville, home of "The Toxic Avenger", "The Class of Nuke 'Em High", and "Tromeo and Juliet."

It starts with Arby and Wendy, two young lovers dry humping in a local sacred Indian burial ground. They are then scared off by a pervert with an axe who becomes the victim of the evil zombie spirits that exist there.

Fast forward to a year later Arby shows up at the Indian Burial ground only now it's a KFC-like chicken place and Wendy's there too, only now she's an animal rights protesting lesbian and wants nothing to do with him. So Arby decides (during a musical number) that "revenge is a dish best served deep fried." He then goes and gets a job.

Arby's coworkers are composed of badass over the top black guy stereotype, pissy shrouded Muslim stereotype, moody gay Mexican stereotype, and beastiality loving drunk southerner stereotype (white supremecist rich Texan stereotype shows up later as the Colonel Sanders knock-off)

Now the souls of the chickens and the souls of the angry Native Americans have banded together to turn the area into a complete hell on Earth.

Let this be a lesson to those of you who have sex with chickens, this is what your children will turn out to be.

It's hard not to draw parallels between this movie and "Zombie Strippers." Both are ridiculous premises, both are not well acted, well written, or able to be taken even the smallest bit seriously. The difference is that "Poultrygeist" doesn't try to be anything else, the jokes were written by someone who knows the difference between "funny" and "tired and used," and it's put together in a way that's fun rather than drawn out and tired by the second act.

The acting is "great" of course this being a b movie that just means the acting is sufficiently atrocious to the point of being comedy gold. Jason Yachanin plays Arby the imbecilic and massively ignorant hero of the film but even the bit parts are done with a hilarious quality that's missing from many films of this type.

Yeah, he's gonna pull a Samuel L. Jackson in "Deep Blue Sea"

"Poultrygeist" delights in being by the book of horror film rules. Two of the most stereotypical scenes (and they ARE overused in horror movies) are when Joshua Olatunde (the designated "black guy" of the movie0 sits the main characters down and tells a Vietnam-like horror story about his encounter with chickens just before being offed and when Rose Ghavami's character dies violently onscreen only to return later without a scratch and when questioned "Didn't you die?" she says simply "There's no time to explain."

As with any Troma film, "Poultrygeist" does whatever it takes to become the pinnicle of bad taste with jokes about race, sexual orientation, environmentalism, toilet humor, and of course splatter comedy so vile that every single set is coated with some sort of gelatinous substance for the last 30 minutes of the movie. What it does particularly well is to present all of these in a manner that is so off the wall and campy that you can't help but laugh.

One mark against it though is that the movie takes a long time to pick up, it takes some time to get to the true gore in this movie and while some of the musical numbers are hilarious, others are just tedious and make the beginning drag somewhat.

Hey look, it's that guy from the Insane Clown Posse!

The effects here are all conventional and well done at that. The massacre shot toward the end rivals that of Peter Jackson's "Braindead/Dead-Alive" for creative kills/amount of blood spilled in one scene.

Overall this film falls somewhere inbetween Lambarto Bava's "Demons" and "Dead-Alive" for the amount of outrageous and over the top gore gags done, and even without those it is incredibly disgusting on the side.

Once again comparing this movie to "Zombie Strippers" this movie does everything right that it did wrong. The gore, while still gratuitous, is an actual set piece and usually some form of gag or memorable event. The actors are good actors playing bad actors as opposed to bad actors playing worse actors, they're corny but they have a good screen presence and don't just seem like random people selected off the street.

There really is no funnier way to describe this picture than what it actually is.

Right now Troma is in dire need of some help, the company is barely scraping by on budgets and it has always been the pinnacle of indie film-makers. Lloyd Kaufman has never bowed down to the MPAA or the government or anyone else with his films. So keep an eye on www.troma.com, maybe pick up some DVDs or soundtracks.

I give "Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" a 5 0ut of 5. Support independent film by going to see the pinnacle of bad taste splatter films.