SHOCK dishes out the turkey in time for Thanksgiving with a salute trash classic BLOOD FREAK.
It’s Thanksgiving! A wonderful time of year where families get together to make complete slobs of themselves as they gobble down all sorts of delicious goodies. And of course, after a great meal, the family gets together to sit in the living room and watch something wholesome and maybe a bit uplifting. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS usually gets a prime time slot on Thanksgiving, so does THE WIZARD OF OZ. But for me, nothing beats sitting around the flat hypnosis device I like to call “TV”, and watching a little ditty called…
…wait for it….
What’s BLOOD FREAK you ask?
Well it’s a 1972 movie about a young man who eats some roast turkey that’s been experimented on by a couple of hillbilly scientists, resulting in his transformation into a turkey headed vampire. What’s even better is that he can only feast on the blood of drug addicts, so all of us normal, non-junk-blooded individuals are safe and sound.
I’m willing to wager that there’s more than a few of you out there who are thinking “Shenanigans! No such film exists!” Well, think again people because it most definitely exists, and it happens to be one of my favorite WTF films of all time. Allow me to tell you the wickedly wretched story of a man named Herschell, and his transformation into the…BLOOD FREAK!
Dang, that sounded quite dramatic there just now, didn’t it? Trust me when I say that nothing in this flick equals up to anything particularly dramatic. Steve Hawkes plays Herschell, who as the film starts, is happily cruising down a California highway while some of the most excruciatingly bad rock music plays over the opening credits. Herschell happens upon a young lady named Ann (Dana Cullivan) who’s sitting by the side of the road with a flat tire on her car severely mocking her. But awesome Herschell knows just what to do, and offers her a ride back home. Once there, she introduces Herschell to her sister Angel (Heather Hughes) and some of Angel’s no good drug addicted buddies. It isn’t too long before Angel seduces Herschell into a relationship that includes sex and smoking dope, which really doesn’t sit well with Ann. Y’see, Ann is a god fearing, bible thumping christian, and she doesn’t think Angel is doing Herschell any good by introducing him to the wild and carefree life of drug addicted Californians. So Ann gets Herschell a job, at a local turkey farm which is run by two scientists who just happen to need someone to sample the turkey that they’re experimenting with (they also happen to be pot heads as well). Herschell obliges, and sometime during the evening his head transforms into a giant paper mache turkey noggin, and this turkey needs the blood of drug addicted humans to survive!
You might be saying to yourselves, “This sounds absolutely awful”, and you would be correct. But there’s awful, and then there’s BLOOD FREAK awful – the differences are immediately evident to anyone who savors this kind of crap (like me!). Writer/Director Brad Grinter (The man behind FLESH FEAST aka Veronica Lake & some maggots vs. Adolf Hitler), concocted a story so ridiculously inept and cheap that he thought that it needed something to get his message across. Too many people would see this as just a stupid giant turkey headed man on a rampage flick, and not the thoughtful anti drug, pro-Jesus film he had in mind. So what did he do? He inserted himself as the onscreen narrator of this mofo!
Much like Lugosi in Ed Wood’s seminal (Yeeah, I called it seminal – look it up if you don’t know what it means) GLEN OR GLENDA, Grinter shows up every so often, sitting behind a desk, sipping on a cocktail, smoking a cigarette or three, and looking down at his script (!) as he pontificates to the audience with some way groovy commentary on the evils of drug use. During his last scene, Grinter suddenly begins to hack up a lung in the middle of his diatribe, so much so that he can’t continue speaking, so he waves his hand at the cameraman as he coughs up phlegm and wanly grins at the audience!
I’m not even gonna get started on the love scene between Angel and Herschell, Turkey Head Herschell that is!! All I’ll say is that it takes in a pitch dark room, and Angel apparently has no clue that she’s having sex with a man wearing a giant papier mache turkey head. It gets so ridiculous that when she asks Herschell about maybe having kids with him in the future, he responds with a few silly sounding gobbles – and she STILL DOESN’T NOTICE!
Blood Freak is something that must be seen, mere words can’t do it justice. There’s so much more I can say about this one, but my space here is limited. Suffice it to say that once seen, BLOOD FREAK can never be forgotten, nor should it be. While it might be easy to say “They don’t make ’em like this anymore”, those words mean nothing because no one’s ever made a film like this before, or since. BlOOD FREAK is a singularly sensational train wreck of a film that simply has to be seen.
Say what you will about its sheer ineptitude, but you know what? Brad Grinter and company went ahead and made their movie.
What have you done lately?
Read more by film freak (and BLOOD FREAK freak) Santos Ellin Jr AKA The Black Saint at www.HorrorNews.net
