By DAVE DUGGINS

Hello, happy HORROR-WOOD heads!

You might remember me from way back in the year 2000, when I last showed my face in these wonderful pages. If you don’t remember, no big deal. If you do, and you’re wondering where I’ve been…don’t ask! Suffice it to say, I missed my home here at HORROR-WOOD. I really missed Renfield. It’s that fly-eating thing. 

Anyway, it’s great to be back, and even though I missed the Halloween issue, I’m back in time for Thanksgiving. We’ve had some fun with the Thanksgiving issue before, haven’t we, horrible horror fans? Sure we have. Way back in the day, we had Five Turkeys for Thanksgiving. We’ve bitten into the bird before … and now, we’re going to do it again. There’s only one this time, but when we’re done, you’ll thank me for that. Trust me. 

This year’s Turkey Day yipe-yarn is Blood Freak, a no-budget Christian exploitation film made in 1971 by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawkes. Ever heard of ‘em? Didn’t think so. Ever heard of a Christian exploitation film? Didn’t think so. We’re off to a good start, don’t you think? 

Okay, so you’re already thinking exploitation film. There are the staple elements, usually in combination: no-name actors, nonsensical story, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, and violence. Add the word "gratuitous" to any of the nouns in that little handful and you’re there. 

So we all expect these things from our cheapie horror flicks, right? You’re ready for them before you even pop the tape in the player. Think you’ve seen it all? We’ve covered a fair number of seriously abysmal flicks in this column. Giant super-smart killer sharks, killer space slime, even a killer tree stump. Sobering stuff. 

I guarantee you will not be ready for the bargain- basement-budget cheesiness that is Blood Freak, not to mention the straight-up strangeness that permeates every frame of this "far-out" flick. You’ll find yourself asking again and again, "Were they serious?" 

Apparently they were. 

The story goes like this: huge, muscular guy who doesn’t speak very good English (but is not Governor-elect Arnold Schwartzeneggar) stops to help a girl whose car has broken down. The girl, it turns out, is Christian – not that you’d know that from your first look at her. She’s a textbook short-skirted convertible-driving exploitation flick babe--until she starts spouting Bible verses, that is. 

Our little Christian lovely takes the hunky hero back to her pad, where her drugged-out, amoral sister and all her doper friends hang out. Good place to go if you’re planning on converting somebody, right? Sure.  

Doper sis decides the biker is a choice catch, and goes about seducing him while does odd jobs for the neighborhood turkey farmer. In doing so, she taunts him into smoking a fattie with her. In a moment of drug culture naiveté that recalls Reefer Madness, he takes four tokes and is hooked. Like heroin hooked. Like writhing around on the floor, tearing his hair out, saying, "I need something, man," which is just another way of saying "I need a fix." 

Damn the pusher man, as Steppenwolf says. Damn the filmmakers, who obviously do not have the first clue about any drug, narcotic or otherwise. 

Bad enough he’s now a pothead, but the plot thickens as we learn the turkey farmer has hired a couple of scientists to experiment on the turkeys to make the meat better for you or something. Our hero (in a moment of unforgivable stupidity, even in a movie this bad) agrees to act as a guinea pig for the drug turkey experiments. Drugged turkey combines with the dope already in our hero’s system, and he undergoes a startling physical change, becoming a hideous turkey-headed monster with a taste for human blood! 

Sorry, I just had to do that. It looks so much better in all italics. If you’re slapping your own forehead right now, take comfort in the knowledge that I did exactly that when I realized what was happening. Two delightfully illogical points add to the overall lunacy of the turkey-headed monster concept. First, why would eating drugged turkey meat turn the guy into a were-turkey? And second, why would this lycanthropic bird want to drink human blood? 

These questions are never answered, of course, and the rest of the film is all about the gorefest. People hanged upside down, blood drained from their slit throats while the creature with the head of a turkey drinks it all down. Make sense? Hell no. Satisfy that H.G. Lewis that lives inside all of us? Well, maybe but…in reality, probably not. There is a kind of dark perversity underlying H.G.’s work that is entirely absent in this film. Here, even the gore effects are just ridiculous, culminating in an utterly tasteless mutilation scene featuring an actual amputee. Now that’s exploitation. This guy must have been seriously desperate for cash. 

None of this mayhem is in any way frightening, and here’s the real problem with why this film isn’t scary: Turkeys. Turkeys are not scary, guys, okay? They’re hilarious. They strut around the farmyard making that stupid gobble-gobble-gobble noise, and then our hero imitates them making that noise. It’s pretty hard to take your hero seriously when he’s clucking like a turkey.  

So you really can’t get past the silliness of the turkey-head mask, and the score contributes absolutely nothing in the way of tension. Soporific acoustic guitar accompanies scenes that should be scored with something at least somewhat dramatic (and if you think music isn’t significant in horror films, try imagining Halloween without that simple but enormously creepy piano motif crawling beneath all that wonderful cinematography). The music, like everything else, is sub-bargain basement. 

Throw all of this together in a blender, pull it out, drain off the grease and slap on the single most clichéd resolution possible, old hat when The Epic of Gilgamesh was hammered into chunks of rock–and then I woke up and it was all a dream! That’s right. Our hero passes out, hallucinates the whole thing, and awakes with a renewed conviction that drugs suck. Drugs are bad. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.  

All’s well that ends well, of course–the Christian chick’s hedonistic sister decides to try the straight life, and our hero hooks up with her. This is pretty cool, since sis is even hotter than the straight-laced one. Did I mention babes in that list of things you always find in exploitation flicks? Maybe I forgot. Better late than never. 

As terrible as this movie is, I have to recommend it simply because it is so sublimely awful. Bad movies are like a glimpse into another world, where things are just slightly sideways, slightly off. Sometimes these things are so ugly they actually become beautiful. Blood Freaks is like that. Like a turkey. So ugly it’s beautiful. 

There may be some folks out there thinking this is the kind of movie (like Reefer Madness, Robot Monster, and Plan 9 From Outer Space) that would be great to watch after passing a little doochie on the left hand side. I would really think twice about that. This thing is twisted enough without drugs.