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.

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As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

For all of my supposed affection for good trashy movies, I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen a film made by Troma, one of the names to know in cinematic junk food. I’m not sure what took me so long. It’s not like I was unfamiliar with the work of Troma and its founder and chief spokesperson, Lloyd Kaufman, having seen boxes for his movies lining the shelves in the Cult section at the local video store. Hell, I’ve enjoyed the hell out of the Troma trailers that have becomes staples of Columbus’ Horror and Sci-Fi Marathons, such as Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD and Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy (“filmed on location in the Republic of Hungary!”).

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Previously on My Troma Summer: Part One, Part Two

My first few days as a barely-paid production assistant in Troma’s three-story walk-up Hell’s Kitchen “studio” were uneventful (and possibly carcinogenic) as my new drill sergeant, Andy, had me organize and inventory several piles of fake severed limbs and other junk in the building’s cramped, asbestos-y basement. After that was done, I was assigned to watch and transcribe every dreadful line of dialogue from one of the company’s recent releases, Fortress of Amerikka, for use by Troma’s overseas distributors (an exercise which at the very least taught me a valuable screenwriting lesson about NOT starting every other line of dialogue in a movie with “Listen,” as in: “Listen, we gotta get outta here.” “But those men will kill us!” “Listen, if we stay here, we’re dead for sure.” “I’m scared!” “Listen, Jennifer, you’ve gotta listen to me...” “Listen! Someone’s coming!”).

And so on.

Andy didn’t have anything in particular for me to do after the Amerikkka transcript was complete, so he decided to further indoctrinate me in the house style by sitting me down with another recent release, Troma’s War, which employed the signature Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz formula of sex, violence, sophomoric humor and paranoid, populist outrage against “the power elite” and all the other assorted scumbags, shysters and pests who plagued the lives of decent, ordinary people.

Of course, like many a populist, Lloyd himself lived much better than the working class heroes he championed, as I discovered when I was summoned one afternoon to the Troma kingpin’s spacious brownstone maisonette to discuss his upcoming production, Kabukiman.

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Previously on My Troma Summer

What happened was this: while filming the second Toxic Avenger sequel on location in Japan, Troma, Inc. co-founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz somehow got hooked up with Toxie fans Tetsu Fujimura and Masaya Nakamura, big wheels at Namco, the Japanese video game company responsible for Pac Man, and the foursome entered into a deal to create a Kabuki-themed superhero movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget, the most lavish in Troma history.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I’d only just received a call from a guy named Andy (soon-to-be First A.D. of the project, then titled Kabukiman), who’d invited me to come down to Hell’s Kitchen and join the Troma Team for the princely sum of fifty dollars a week.  In New York City.   

Fortunately, I had a friend from the Harvard Lampoon who lived on the Upper East Side with his beautiful wife from Spain, and they offered me room and board in exchange for my help writing text for a coffee-table book featuring artistic photographs of feces.  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

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Last week, indiewire.com announced that Troma, Inc.’s, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, “debuted” at New York’s Village East End Cinema with “a finger licking good per-screen average of $10,700,” thanks in part to the typically relentless promotional efforts of the film’s director (and Troma founding father) Lloyd Kaufman, who “dressed as a chicken” and picketed the theater prior to the premiere.

Troma’s brand identity and marketing have always been at least as entertaining as the cinematic output of the defiantly independent (formerly) Hell’s Kitchen “studio.” Since the production company’s inception in 1974, Yale graduates Kaufman (and his partner, Michael Herz) had no illusions about the carnival huckster nature of their enterprise: the name TROMA itself is (allegedly) an acronym for “Tits R Our Main Attraction,” in honor of the duo’s early slate of sex comedies, including Squeeze Play and Sizzle Beach, U.S.A., featuring a then-unknown, now presumably mortified Kevin Costner. 

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Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, a film directed by Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, opens in theaters this weekend. Which is kind of weird, because it already opened in New York a couple of Christmas seasons back, and then had a belated general opening last year. Apparently the always-innovative Kaufman has decided to keep opening it at periodic intervals until somebody notices. (We noticed, Lloyd. You can stop now.) What's also unusual about Poultrygeist is that, by making a film about "chicken zombies," Troma has opted to make a movie that will probably not be the worst movie of its kind ever made. With the Toxic Avenger series, Troma all but cornered the market in bad franchise films about a superhero born of toxic waste. No sorrier examination of the phenomenon of fat guys going nutzoid exists than Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid; all surf Nazis films are surpassed in lousiness by Surf Nazis Must Die. But without having seen Poultrygeist--a state of virginal innocence that I fully intend to maintain for the remainder of my days on Earth, so that it'll be a fresh experience for me if they want to show it to me in Hell--I feel confident in my belief that his film will pale in ghastliness to the immortal Blood Freak, co-directed in 1972 by Brad F. Grinter and the picture's star, Steve Hawkes. Lloyd is getting on in years and has been at this a while now, and certain things benefit from the enthusiasm of youthful amateurism.

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As a professional film critic, it is my most sacred duty to deliver honest, truthful assessments of the films I am assigned to see — and to review them fairly without prejudice or favor.  It would be a betrayal of my professional and personal standards to review, positively or negatively, a film without actually seeing it. Having said that, here’s a prediction: Saw IV, which opens today nationwide after having been completed approximately three days ago, is going to suck. Now, I say this without having seen Saw IV; for that matter, I say this without having seen Saw I, Saw II or Saw III. For all I know, they’re cinematic masterworks the likes of which Orson Welles could never dare to dream. But let’s face it: the fourth installment in any series, let alone one as misbegotten as the Saw series, has the deck stacked against it from the jump-off. The number of Part 4s that have been worth watching can be counted on one hand; it just so happens that I have five fingers on my left hand, so here’s five fours that aren’t complete wastes of time.

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