POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD (2006)
A while back, I started blogging about the summer I spent working for Troma Films as a production assistant (and eventual second assistant director, co-screenwriter and co-star) of the company’s terrible, terrible superhero spoof, Sgt. Kabumikman, NYPD. One of these days, I’ll eventually continue that tale, but in a nutshell, Troma (which allegedly stands for Tits R Our Main Attraction) was founded in 1974 by Yale grads Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz to produce and distribute softcore sex romps and, eventually, their own unique brand of gross-out message movies, chock full of gratuitous monsters, violence, nudity and critiques of corporate malfeasance. The fact that Troma’s stayed in business for so many years as one of the only truly independent production companies in America would probably be more inspiring if their exploitation films weren’t so consistently godawful (despite the cult popularity of “hits” like The Toxic Avenger, Tales From The Crapper, Surf Nazis Must Die, etc.). Having watched (and even helped to create) hours and hours of the company’s poorly acted, juvenile and just plain ugly swill, I must say I was pleasantly shocked by the uncharacteristically high quality of the poopy jokes in Poultrygeist, the company’s most recent major release. Not only is the cast star-studded (well...there’s a cameo by Ron Jeremy and a hall-of-fame gross-out performance by Troma regular Joe Fleishaker), but the romantic leads (Jason Yachanin and especially the radiant Kate Graham) seem like honest-to-god actors...y'know, with actual careers ahead of them. The script and direction are noticeably smarter and tighter than most past efforts, and best of all: it’s a musical, with song and dance numbers at least ten times better than Baz Luhrmann’s recent Oscar monstrosity. And why not? After all, there’s no rule that says exploitation movies have to be terrible...just as long as they’re shocking, bloody and gloriously naked.
MANIAC COP (1988)
It has an awesomely blunt, cheesy title. It was directed by Maniac’s William Lustig. And it was written by It’s Alive’s Larry Cohen. Toss in Bruce Campbell, and what you have is potential B-movie heaven. Unfortunately, Maniac Cop didn’t turn out to be the ne plus ultra of slasher flicks, but it is the type of rough-around-the-edges horror film that delivers splatter imbued with some mildly potent undercurrents. Offering up a classic return-of-the-repressed scenario, Lustig’s story concerns a detective’s (genre legend Tom Atkins) search for a homicidal cop, whose crimes have been pinned on an innocent officer (Campbell). The real culprit is a resurrected boy-in-blue who’s hell-bent on exacting revenge against the bureaucrats responsible for his death, a group of government cretins whom Cohen’s script gleefully skewers before sending to grisly deaths. Politically charged as it is, however, Maniac Cop’s critique of the powers-that-be never interferes with its low-budget thrills and kills, including a great one involving a man’s face and some wet cement.
GATOR BAIT (1974)
As the internationally renowned author of Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, it would hardly be appropriate for me to participate in an exploitation movie roundup without including a little something from the wild world of hixploitation. Since the poster for Gator Bait happens to be hanging on my living room wall mere inches from where I now sit – hick chick supreme Claudia Jennings giving me a come-hither look (or maybe that’s an I’ll-rip-your-tongue-out look) as I blog in my boxer shorts – it seems like as good a choice as any. In this “redneck romper-stomper” from Louisiana mom-and-pop team Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, Jennings and her form-fitting Daisy Dukes star as Desiree Thibodeau, a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. Desiree uses her sexual wiles and her swampy know-how, employing such tried-and-true tactics as the ol’ sack of snakes trick to pick off her toothless, inbred foes one by one. The sleaze-meter runs into the red zone early and often (Desiree’s little sister avoids being gang-raped only because the nutless hillbilly freaks out and blasts her between the legs with a shotgun), and Jennings’ Cajun accent is shaky at best, but her confident embodiment of the sexy action hero is indisputable.
B. J. LANG PRESENTS (1971)
One function of low-budget movies is to give employment to new actors on the rise or veteran performers who are down on their luck. When a good actor is practically the only thing a filmmaker has in his arsenal, you may get to see just what he can do when forced to single-handedly keep a movie on life support. But it's hard to think of another one-man show quite like this one. Also known under the title The Manipulator, it is the only film directed by one Yabo Yablinsky, and stars Mickey Rooney as a theatrical lunatic who has kidnapped a woman (Luana Anders) and spirited her to his backstage lair. Anders has practically nothing to do but whimper and stare at Rooney in disbelief, and the only other real member of the cast is Keenan Wynn, who turns up out of nowhere for no particular reason at the very end, leading the viewer to speculate that Yablinsky must have found an extra fifty dollars under the couch cushions on the last day of shooting. There's a story that Klaus Kinski was once working on a movie on which filming was stalled while the director grappled with a problem in the script, and Kinski announced, "There is no problem. I have the solution: Put the camera on me!" B. J. Lang Presents is Mickey Rooney's Klaus Kinski close-up. For an hour and a half you get to watch him race about the set, throw props around, babble endlessly to himself, babble endlessly to mannequins, talk to himself in funny voices that he thinks are the voices of the mannequins talking back, laugh maniacally, just stand there maniacally, dance and twirl a broomstick in comically speeded-up motion, dress up as Cyrano de Bergerac, and give a suspiciously convincing impersonation of a man who didn't know until this very scene that Keenan Wynn was also in this movie. At times you may wonder if Yablinsky paid Rooney for his work in this film or if Rooney paid him, but I confess to finding his go-for-broke turn fascinating, even mesmerizing, recalling in equal parts Laurence Olivier's Archie Rice in The Entertainer and Jerry Lewis at the point around 4 A.M. Sunday during the Labor Day telethon when his latest infusion of caffeine kicks in just as his meds are wearing off. Every actor worth his salt ought to have one of these on his IMDB page. They'd probably sleep better for it.
DANCE HALL RACKET (1953)
This sixty-minute ball of sleaze is notable for being the closest that Lenny Bruce ever got to his lifelong dream of breaking into movies. The big studios thought the controversial comic was too hot to handle, and though he himself initiated this project and wrote the script, he apparently didn't see it as an opportunity to allay their fears by showing his warm and fuzzy side. Directed by Phil Tucker -- it was his first film, made the same year that he threw a diving helmet on a guy in a gorilla suit and called the result Robot Monster -- it's almost entirely set in and around the titular establishment, where dime-a-dance girls (one of whom is played by Lenny's stripper wife, Honey Harlowe) tend to the customers up front while all kinds of shady doings are going on in the back. (The plot involves a smuggler who's brought precious jewels into the country sewn into the ear of a puppy.) Lenny plays Vinnie, the cretinous, switchblade-flipping assistant to Timothy Farrell, a dead-faced actor with a mustache who looks like Wayne Newton gone horribly, horribly wrong. (Farrell appeared in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? and Jail Bait and the Wood-scripted The Sinister Urge, and it would be an understatement to say that he always played the same kind of character; in fact, Dance Hall Racket was the third picture, after The Devil's Sleep and Racket Girls, in which his character was named "Umberto Scalli." Maybe he had trouble remembering that the other actors in a scene were addressing him unless they called him by a name that he had gotten used to.) In the end, Lenny is killed while the audience is still trying to digest the energetic cameo appearance by his mother, Sally Marr, and the reporter who is being told the story of the Dance Hall Racket case in the framing sequence closes his notebook with an impressed whistle. Bruce died in 1966, five years before he finally got to be associated with a good movie, when director John Magnuson used one of his greatest standup routines as the soundtrack and basis for the 1971 animated short Thank You Mask Man.
Beware Of Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent