I'm not a Troma fan, usually finding their films too amateurish and puerile for even me to enjoy. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, however, is actually pretty good.
Like most of their output, it's been made for chicken feed, and features the usual Troma ingredients: gratuitous T&A, shonky OTT gore FX, awful politically incorrect gags, crap direction, and shoddy acting from an extremely untalented cast. But it also manages to be pretty damn funny (there's loads of biting satire and some fun one-liners) and is so deliriously demented that it's almost impossible not to enjoy. Oh... and it's also a musical!!!
The plot to Poultrygeist is every bit as bird-brained as the title suggests: when a fast food outlet is built on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, the result is possessed deep-fried portions of chicken which turn those who eat it into carnivorous zombie fowl. Battling for survival against the feathered undead are American Chicken Bunker counter-'girl' Arbie (Jason Yachanin) and his lesbian girlfriend Wendy (Kate Graham). Will Arbie and Wendy successfully fly the coop, or will they end up pecked to death?
Directed by Troma head honcho Lloyd Kauffman, this film is aimed squarely at the kind of twisted freaks who actively seek out the outrageous and the downright disgustingso naturally I had to watch it. And, for the most part, Poultrygeist hits the target.
With loads of gross-out gore, plenty of nekkidness, and dubious jokes about bestiality, lesbianism, terrorism, homosexuality, racism, and bowel movements, there is something here to offend everyone! All of this unwholesome content is regularly punctuated by song and dance routines that, although hardly on a par with Sondheim or Lloyd Webber, are still a lot of fun.
The only thing that really lets the film down is its running time: 103 minutes is a bit long for this kind of movie, and the joke does start to wear a bit thin towards the end.
Still, after all that I've said about Troma films in the past, Poultrygeist leaves me with egg on my face!
