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Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.03 miles, 9’37”/mile, 01:07:43 (slow recovery run)

 

You rolled your eyes at Halloween on Halloween… You gazed in heavy-lidded ennui at Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th… But nothing could prepare you for the shocking lack of creative initiative that is… ThanksKilling on Thanksgiving: (Pilgrim) Hat Trick! Yes, folks, if you thought I was going to come up with something original or clever to watch after forcing down Field Roast en croûte, Parker House rolls, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, roasted rainbow carrots with shiitake mushrooms and Brussels sprouts, Thanksgiving vegan slurry (comprising stuffing, macaroni and cheese, cranberries, and mushroom gravy), and butterscotch cinnamon pie with a ginger snap crust, you’re even dozier than I was, and I was in a carb coma so deep it was impractical to measure it in fathoms.

 

And yet, somehow I still dragged my carcass onto the treadmill and got seven miles under my straining belt. How, you ask? Well, I can’t be certain, but I suspect the fundamental badness of ThanksKilling should claim at least partial credit for keeping me in a perpetual state of disbelief as to just what the hell I was looking at. When I read the description on Amazon Prime—“a homicidal turkey axes off college kids during Thanksgiving break”—I knew I wasn’t exactly in for a Kurosawa marathon. But what I was not prepared for was that the aforementioned homicidal turkey TALKS. Indeed, he swears a blue streak and cracks dumb one-liners. It’s a whole thing.

 

Let’s break down ThanksKilling like my digestive tract is breaking down all those starches into simple sugars to make my pancreas freak out: it starts, simply enough, with naked pilgrim boobs. The historical-times pilgrim lady to whom they belong is running from a demonic turkey, who kills her with a tomahawk. Cut to the present day, and five college students—two or three of whom probably shouldn’t have graduated middle school—are carpooling back to their home town for Thanksgiving. But the car breaks down, so they have to camp out for the night, which is when Darren (“the nerd”) tells them the campfire story of a demonic turkey summoned forth by Native American magic to kill as many white people as possible every 500-odd years. That seems like a really long time between vengeance-slaughters, but far be it from me to question the wisdom of the ancients.

 

You will be gobsmacked to learn, I am sure, that tonight is the night of the turkey’s semimillennial rampage, and from that point on, ThanksKilling has all the typical elements of your standard homicidal talking turkey story: turkey taunts kids in the woods; turkey shoots guy in the head and steals his car; turkey murders kids’ parents; turkey rapes college girl before breaking her neck; turkey fools local sheriff by wearing Groucho glasses; turkey cuts off sheriff’s face and wears it as an impenetrable disguise; etc. etc. etc. In other words, no big surprises. Meanwhile, our remaining carpool heroes are working to crack the secret to killing the invincible magic turkey, there’s a subplot with a hermit with a shotgun who wants to avenge the death of his dog, and, predictably enough, a convenient container of radioactive waste figures heavily in the climax.

 

ThanksKilling was thrown together for a few thousand bucks by literal college kids, and it shows: the acting is basically college students reading lines, the script is full of running JonBenét Ramsey gags and references to ghost-riding the whip, and the effects are scraped together from whatever they could find at Family Dollar—the exception being the turkey puppet, which is actually pretty dope. ThanksKilling isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen—not by a LONG shot—but it’s among the worst I’ve watched since starting this whole Running Scared nonsense, which is saying something. And therein lies a dilemma, and an updated Zen koan: if a film is bad in the woods and nobody is around to watch it, does it still suck? Or, more to the point, if a film is bad on purpose and everybody expects and wants it to be, is it still a bad film?

 

So while I acknowledge that ThanksKilling is probably an objectively worse movie than, say, Can’t Take It Back (which I gave my lowest rating to date), intent matters, as does budget and general access to resources. Furthermore, ThanksKilling was honestly better than the other lowest-rated movie, Verotika, which not only made less narrative sense and had about equally poor acting, effects, and general production value, but also clearly TRIED TO BE GOOD and, worse yet, thought it had succeeded.

 

To bottom-line it for you, though, I wouldn’t expect many people to think ThanksKilling is fun to watch unless they’re dedicated schlock fans or either stoned or too full of gravy and pie to change the channel. Am I glad I watched it? Sure. Will I watch it again? Probably not, but never say never.

 

Will I watch the sequel? Tune in next Thanksgiving to find out.

 

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 8.03 miles, 9’09”/mile, 01:13:36 (long recovery run)

 

Oh man, where to start with The Rage? I came across it while browsing for something a little more off the beaten path, and said to myself, “Oh, hey! I saw that like ten years ago! That’s the movie about… um…” To my consternation, I found I couldn’t remember anything about The Rage except that it was yet another zombie-virus flick and that it starred Erin Brown. Granted, my memory ain’t what it used to be (and what it used to be wasn’t all that great), but I find the fact that I watched this movie and was unable to recall anything about it to be somewhat alarming. So I gave it a spin.

 

Well, it turns out that my worries about early-onset dementia are likely unfounded, and that my brain simply repressed any memory of this movie as a self-protective measure. In short, it’s not good.

 

The Rage begins in a remote cabin in the woods, which a demented Russian scientist named Dr. Vasilienko has turned into a grungy lab of horrors. He’s got a cage of shambling zombies eating a little girl in the background while he’s busy at work cutting open the skulls of a couple of (still-living) unfortunate victims and infecting them with his homegrown Rage virus, which both turns people into crazed cannibals and causes massive rapid deformities—you know, standard mad scientist stuff. Unfortunately, Things Go Wrong™ and a Rage-infected test subject escapes into the woods… but not before infecting Vasilienko himself.

 

From there, it writes itself: the test subject kills a couple of people having sex in a car and then manages to get himself eaten by vultures, who themselves hulk out and also gain the ability to infect people with Rage by (of course) projectile-vomiting on them. Said vultures then attack an uncle who’s fishing with his niece and nephew; after taking a stream of bird-yench straight in the face, he winds up eating the girl’s vulture-mangled corpse and killing the boy before getting splattered over the road by an RV full of bickering nu-metal fans who spent the night taking drugs and having three-ways. (A tale as old as time; it’s pretty much Beowulf but with slightly more group sex.)

 

Anyway, the nu-metal fans do their best to fend off attacks by Rage Vultures and the survivors flee through the woods… right into Vasilienko’s Science-’n’-Murder Shack. They’re captured and treated to—and I swear I am not making this up—a pond-ripple wipe to an extended sepia-toned flashback in which Vasilienko narrates his entire backstory. Apparently he cured cancer, but it was all covered up by Big Pharma and now he’s trying to infect the country with Rage and hold the antidote hostage until his brilliance is acknowledged (like ya do). Will the last few survivors escape Dr. Vasilienko and his band of Raged-out zombies to save humanity? More importantly, do you care?

 

Clearly I didn’t, since I saw all this ten years ago and didn’t remember any of it. While I’m a big fan of Ms. Brown (the erstwhile Misty Mundae), that wasn’t enough to get me invested in a script with, effectively, zero characters in it other than the mad doctor, whose story we aren’t told until the movie is almost over, and which is pretty hackneyed anyway. So yeah, don’t expect The Rage to deliver anything close to a satisfying narrative.

 

If, however, all you’re looking for is a whole lotta splatter, buddy, you have come to the right place. That opening scene alone is a total gorefest free-for-all, and it pales in comparison to the final reel. I thought the start-at-110%-end-at-150% approach felt familiar, and it turns out that The Rage was directed by Robert Kurtzman, the guy who directed Wishmaster. That film followed a very similar curve, with the side-effects-laden parties from hell at the beginning and end. Notably, Andrew Divoff stars in both movies as well, here as Vasilienko, there as the djinn. I initially thought Vasilienko had a bad Russian accent, but Divoff is actually Russian; apparently terrible melodramatic dialogue will make even real Russian accents sound fake.

 

The practical special effects are really compelling, which is perhaps no surprise, since Kurtzman is first and foremost an effects wonk. However, every time the movie uses CGI, the results range from simply bad to downright appalling. The worst is the excrement fountain in the final battle, which I would say “looked like crap,” but of course the point is that it didn’t. At all. I will say, however, that at least the CGI vultures seem considerably less-awful if you’ve seen Birdemic. (“Birdemic: The Movie That Makes a Z-Grade Zombie Flick From Three Years Earlier Seem Like a Frickin’ LucasFilm Production!”)

 

So that’s that: gorehounds may get a kick out of The Rage, but don’t expect anything more, even if you’re an Erin Brown fan (though she does get to kick some zombie butt in the final battle). I’m actually a little curious about the script, because the movie starts out maybe taking itself seriously and is just bad, but I get the distinct feeling that at some point everyone just kind of gave up and let it collapse into a total self-parody with cheesy one-liners and gimmicky zombie boss-fights. Or maybe it’s just really uneven and was always meant to be that way. Who knows? Not me—and if I did, apparently I’d forget soon enough anyway.

 

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.30 miles, 8’49”/mile, 55:35 (recovery run)

 

I’d never seen Bloodsucking Freaks, though I’d certainly heard of it—most horror fans probably have, as it’s one of those infamous titles that gets thrown around as an example of a Z-grade movie that would be too sick to stomach were it not so laughably inept. I hadn’t heard any details about it, though, and wasn’t even aware that it was a Troma film—you know, the folks who brought us The Toxic Avenger? But it turned up on a list of the 50 Worst Films Ever Made that I’d stumbled across in my travels, so I checked around, and, yep, wouldn’t you know it, it was available on Shudder. So I gave it a shot, and it was both not at all what I expected and 110% EXACTLY what I expected.

 

First off, I should probably get this out of the way: it’s an extraordinarily ugly film. It’s vile. It’s contemptible and gross, and not just because of the gore. Basically, you really don’t want to watch this unless you have a VERY strong stomach—not for blood, nor even for graphic violence (the effects are poor enough that I doubt anyone’s going to be much put off by them). The thing about Bloodsucking Freaks that will really get to a lot of viewers is a streak of misogyny so far advanced it’s essentially a gangrenous limb that fell off, became self-aware, and is happily living out its days as a self-sustaining infection.

 

Let’s talk about the plot. Oh, you heard there wasn’t a plot? So did I—I was under the impression that Bloodsucking Freaks was little more than a series of unconnected scenes of gory violence—sort of a Faces of Death dynamic—but I was laboring under a misapprehension: it’s actually a series of scenes of gory violence connected via an ACTUAL STORY, albeit a thin and preposterous one. Master Sardu, assisted by the diminutive Ralphus, has an off-off-Broadway “theater of the macabre,” basically a Grand Guignol nudie show in which naked women are brutally tormented and killed onstage. The audience thinks it’s all fake, but nope, it’s real. Sardu, who funds his theatrical endeavors via international white slavery, craves validation from the art world, and thus takes exception to some harsh words from critic Creasy Silo. Sardu has Ralphus kidnap both Silo and renowned ballerina Natasha Di Natalie to star in his grand vision of a ballet of torture and death. Natalie’s boyfriend, pro football player Tom Maverick, enlists the help of crooked cop John Tucci to find the missing Natalie, while the opening night of Sardu’s twisted vision draws nearer…

 

…Aaaand while all that’s going on, Sardu and Ralphus are happily gambling with severed fingers, decapitating schoolgirls and having sex with the remains, giving women to a demented doctor so that he can drill into their heads and suck out their brains with a straw, etc. etc. etc. It’s an ever-escalating list of outrages that reminded me of how Pink Flamingos keeps upping its shock value, except the outrages in Bloodsucking Freaks almost exclusively deal in the torture, rape, and murder of naked women. If I thought that this was strictly because the filmmakers knew it would be the easiest way to shock their audience, that would be one thing, but that is not at all the impression I get. Everything about the violence-on-women scenes feels… mean-spirited, I guess? Like, the film could have taken a satiric approach, or even just remained repugnantly neutral about it all, but instead somehow you get the very palpable sense that this movie is taking the plausibly deniable but ultimately unmistakable stance that raping and dismembering women for fun is the bee’s knees.

 

One could imagine that position to be slightly at odds with the movie’s attempts at social commentary. What’s that? You also heard that Bloodsucking Freaks doesn’t have any social commentary? Well, it doesn’t have much, but surprisingly, it does make a distracted and feeble attempt at it. For one thing, you do get a sense that at least on some level you’re watching a satire of the ’70s New York City art scene, with the critics as haughty gatekeepers that suppress “true art” in favor of what’s safe and commercial. For another, you’ve got Sardu, a rich white guy with a posh accent, taking visible delight in both literally and figuratively bleeding the rest of humanity dry while he satiates his deviant desires. I don’t mean to say this film is an intentional satirical indictment of capitalism, but hey, one can dream. Oh, and let’s not forget how the cops are portrayed: Sgt. Tucci flat out tells Tom that the NYC police won’t lift a finger to help unless he hands over $10,000. And who can forget the scene when Tom first calls 911 to report Natalie’s disappearance, and gets an answering machine? So yeah, it has things to say, though not overly much and not especially well.

 

That said, though, there is definitely more to Bloodsucking Freaks than I had been led to believe, and when I caution people about seeing it, it’s more out of concern for viewers’ sensibilities than because I think the film ought not to be seen. If you do watch it, though, and you’re not completely irredeemable, be forewarned that you might need six or eight Silkwood showers before you start to feel clean again.