BLOOD FREAK (1972)
Article 3606 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-14-2011
Posting Date: 6-29-2011
Directed by Brad F. Ginter and Steve Hawkes
Featuring Steve Hawkes, Dana Cullivan, Heather Hughes
Country: USA
What it is: Christian anti-drug cautionary gore film

A biker takes a job as a food tester at a poultry farm where they have been using experimental drugs. This, combined with his own drug habit, causes him to turn into a blood-drinking turkey monster.

Imagine, if you will, that Herschell Gordon Lewis became a born-again Christian, and decided to use his skills as a gore movie director to make a horror-film update of REEFER MADNESS. I’d heard about this movie for years, and when I got a copy, I held off watching it until it popped up on my hunt list, so I could handle it properly. It’s cheap, amateurish, quite awful, demented, but not quite the laugh riot of some of my favorite bad movies. The only time it gets truly offensive is when it decides to slaughter a turkey onscreen for shock effect. It has one of those endings that will make you want to throw something at your TV screen, but, given the type of movie it is, I’m not surprised it ended the way it does. Still, there are a couple of side comments I want to make about this one. For one, I admire at least that the movie doesn’t restrict its drug criticism to just the illegal variety; after all, the experimental drugs used on the turkeys also shoulder part of the blame. And, if you bear the above comment in mind, then the scene where the movie’s chain-smoking narrator breaks into a coughing fit is not near as impenetrable as some of the comments I’ve heard make it out to be, especially if you’re actually paying attention to what he’s saying.