Film Review Poultrygeist Night Of The Chicken Dead

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2006 – Spoiler alerts An outrageous and extremely funny work of bad taste zero budget film making from the Troma Entertainment studios responsible for such schlock as Toxic Avenger & The Class Of Nuke ‘Em High. The film is a savage satire on American fast food culture, and a spoof on the horror movie genre, with comedy and song making it reminiscent of the Rocky Horror Show & The Little Shop Of Horrors. When a thinly disguised KFC style franchise, Chicken Bunker, open a restaurant on an old sacred Indian Burial ground, protesters include radical feminist student lesbians, vegetarians and one solitary Native American Indian. Discovering that his former girlfriend, Wendy, (Kate Graham) has joined the lesbian faction, and is having an affair with their leader, Arbie (Jason Yacharin) counter-protests by taking a job at the Bunker right on the brink of its grand opening day. He finds himself working with an extra-ordinary group of misfits, including Paco Bell (the name itself a pun on fast food franchise Taco Bell), a Mexican, a hippy who seems to like to have sex with semi-frozen chicken carcasses, an army colonel, and Hummus, an Iranian woman who spends most of the film in a Burqa, and says she’ll explode if anyone else accidentally pronounces her name as Hammas. Another figure at the restaurant is Arbie’s older self, (his time travelling activity never explained) who has been stuck in Fast Food work for most of his 60 years. He is played by the film’s director, Lloyd Kaufman. The last figure to join the team is the General, (clearly modelled on KFC’s Colonel Saunders), dressed in white Plantation tycoon suits, a blatant racist and clearly without scruples. As it becomes clear to Wendy that The General, as a publicity stunt has staged the lesbian protest, her feelings for Arbie are reawakened. Unfortunately, this coincides with the chicken produce giving diners extreme diarrhoea, vomiting fits and a tendency to turn into giant zombie chickens. The numbers dwindle, as the heroes struggle to survive, and decide that capitalist, corporate intense ‘Concentration coops’ are wrong, but will any of them survive to love and sing another day? There are some great lines here, and a glorious disregard for political correctness. The film is firmly post 9/11 too. ‘Oh Shi’te’ mumbles Hummus as she sees the monsters approaching. She eventually turns into a bikini clad Baywatch Babe before becoming a suicide bomber for the right to American Chicken. Paco Bell fares no better, being killed early on, but returning as a talking lump of meat. With the line “America isn't ready to accept a gay Mexican chicken sandwich.” Several lines parody current Fast Food advertising jungles. The General, for example, being forced to eat his own produce, saying ‘I’m loving it’, (a line that ends many MacDonald’s ads shown around the World), right before he mutates into a demon chicken. Poultrygeist had a troubled history, (subject of a making of film in its own right) and took three years to bring to completion, mostly becoming a labour of love with fans of Troma films willing to appear for free, sets being dismantled prematurely, props and special effects failing to work, and heated arguments and fights breaking out among the passionate cast members. It’s not a film for the chicken hearted. One lady stormed out of the screening I attended, shouting loudly that she was disgusted by the film. I thought it was a bona fide classic. Inventive, original, and sometimes jaw dropping in its audacity. Youtube trailer clip of the movie Arthur Chappell