Blood Freak

Blood Freak

D: Brad Grinter, Steve Hawkes (1971); with Hawkes, Dana Culliver, Randy Grinter, Tina Anderson. I watch a lot of movies. A lot of my movie-watching time is admittedly spent plumbing the depths of the cinematic septic system. It's sort of a fetish of mine; I mean, I'd rather watch some obscure piece of drive-in swill any day than sit through a screening of big-budget dung clusters like Lost & Found or Independence Day or the latest Van Damme vehicle or -- well, you get the picture. However, after Blood Freak, forget about Herschell Gordon Lewis, Andy Milligan, Bert Gordon, or Al Adamson. This may be the most stupefying, unbelievable length of celluloid these jaded eyes have ever been fixed on for 90 minutes. This is a film that actually drags down the entire medium by a notch or two, a blot on the entire body of cinematic art. Hawkes plays Herschell, a musclebound, oversized dude with Joe Namath hair, wide sideburns, and Elvis shades who rides a Harley (very slowly and carefully, I might add). He stops to help Angel, a girl with a flat tire, who then invites him back to her house. He follows along, then meets her sister Ann. The first sister is a Bible-quoting prisspot, while sister #2 is a libertine, beer-drinking, weed-smoking party girl. Herschell calls another girl a tramp when she comes on to him, so Ann and that girl's boyfriend agree to make the hunky Nam vet into an addict. He quickly gives up his reluctance to smoke the stuff and is soon offered a job at Ann's father's turkey farm. His job is twofold -- helping with the day-to-day poultry operations and testing turkey meat that comes from the lab. As it turns out, Herschell is offered some drugged turkey meat, smokes pot, shakes, has convulsions, and is transformed into a turkey monster with an enormous top-heavy papier-mâché turkey head!!! Dressed in a denim shirt and flares, he confronts Ann on her leopardskin waterbed; she screams, then calms down and says, "Boy, you sure are ugly." Making gobbling noises all the while, the monster tracks down several drug dealers and slaughters them in various gruesome ways (one guy is held down while his leg is amputated at the knee with a table saw). He hallucinates being eaten, decapitating a live turkey, and other people devouring a Thanksgiving Butterball with their bare hands. As it turns out, it was all a huge hallucination, and Angel saves Herschell with prayer, of course. All the while, director Grinter (a dissipated, low-rent, poor man's Hugh Heffner wannabe) pops in from time to time to narrate (very reminiscent of Bela Lugosi's role in Glen or Glenda). Reading from typewritten sheets, he chain smokes, rambles on about "catalysts" and "the human body for a mixing bowl for chemicals" before being seized in a purple-faced coughing fit at the end! Sound weird? Words fail me for once in trying to describe this atrocity. The sound, editing, camerawork, lighting, rock music soundtrack, and make-up are all several steps below a public-access cable production. Despite the surprisingly high attractive-babe count, the rest of the cast is as ugly a bunch of greaseballs as you'd see in any early John Waters movie. But beyond that, what the hell was the point? Is it an anti-drug screed? Is it a horror movie? Is it a Christian propaganda film? Who saw it in its theatrical run? Whatever it is, it's the most dumbfounding made-in-Florida piece of filmic flotsam I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot. It's so bad, so weird, that any conventional ideas of "suspension of disbelief" or "narrative integrity" don't even apply. If I ever met the director of Blood Freak, I don't know whether I'd kick him in the shins, buy him a drink, or flee in abject terror. Incredible.