Film Review: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Film Review

 Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

 

This film would've fit nicely along with the other Chicken-Horror experiments here, but it's so damn over the top with it's gross outs that the only responsible thing to do is warn anyone from showing it to their friends. 

Take away the gross outs, and what you have left is watchable. As it stands, the film wastes no time getting into the heart and stomach of the audience. Once there, it begins it's mischief. It looks like a B movie from the 70s, it's got musical numbers, but I can't for the life of me determine who this film is meant to be for. I've come to the conclusion that it's just a prank to play on unsuspecting people who don't know what they are about to witness. 

It's not the blood, not the love making, it's not the chickens, it's not even the anti progressive slant, it's the shit scenes. The shit scenes. That's exactly what they are and they linger with me even as I try to sanitize my mind by writing this review. They are exactly what they sound like and they go on for ages. I guess that's the appeal of a Troma film.They "go there" wherever other fim makers fear to tread. 

I stopped at the shit scene because it was repulsive and offensive. A overweight man drops his trousers and goes to the bathroom with the camera in the toilet. Nothing is left to the imagination in the diarrehea nightmare that comes after. It goes on for ten minutes if its ten seconds long. It went on and on. The joke is clearly on me, and it wasn't going to get better. 

This movie is not a 0 out of 10. It is a solid 1. It's a real film that someone crafted. If not for the gross outs, what we'd have is a decent B grade Chicken Horror film. I wanted to like this film, but if I wanted suck this kind of thing up then I would've gotten a job in the sewer. 

This movie is for the movie fan that is bored of everything out there right now, and needs something pungent and not afraid of controversy. 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzEA5R0XHOQ

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462485/

He Doesn't Bite

 

He Doesn’t Bite

V jumped rope in the alley behind the row of large empty houses.

Skip, skip, skip.

From the kitchen window she heard the sound of her mom chopping chicken feet.

Slice, Slice.

She swung the rope over her head and skipped.

The knife sliced the flesh from the skin of a chicken heart.

The girl skipped and skipped, her black hair masking her eyes, her shoes bouncing on the leaves by the gutter, she smiled at other kids but let her smile drop when she noticed they wore different clothes and spoke in a strange dialect. All alone she hopped and let her heart race. The rope scraped the pavement. The knife scrapped the cutting board. Her shoes skidded on the driveway.

The knife sliced her mom’s finger and blood poured over the sink. The girl looked back to find the kids, and athe rope hit her ankle. She stepped to catch herselt but he rope held her heel back, and she tumbled to the ground.

V parents moved here. She hated it so much. So far at school she only got bossed around by indifferent teachers and pushed down by the other boys and girls. She didn’t eat meat. She didn’t believe in things like science or the stars. The doctors told her she had Aphasiac Sensory Deprivation Disorder. She wore a crystal to negate it’s effects. The crystal around her neck protected her as the ground twisted and smacked her on the back of the head. The rope wrangled her by the neck. Knots tangled around her head, wrists, and ankles. An old man stood watching her from the other side of a chain link fence. A leash in his hand.

It looked like a dog at first, but it had horns, and chewed the links of metal fencing. It panted hard. It’s entire chest heaved with steam. It’s eyeballs kept moving, following something invisable, over their heads.

It opened its mouth, and large fangs unfurled.

“He doesn’t bite.” the old man assured her.

V noticed that both man and hound were looking at her. Not as someone who needs help getting up, someone who needs to get home to get her scrapes treated, but as someone with a precious stone hanging off her neck. They both glared with hunger, trembled with excitement, sweated with anxiety over it’s ability.

When the crystal saw them, the hound began tearing the fence apart and barking. The old man let go of the leash and started ripping the links apart. His arms reached through, then his legs. Long, sliced apart by the metal rings, the flesh peeled away to reveal the muscles to V. She screamed when she saw that the calf, the hind legs of muscle, didn’t lap up the bones of the leg and arm. They constricted around his upper leg, but his body didn’t jump. The calves tensed up, but the knee didn’t drive forward. The tendons of the bones slipped out of the socket. His movement lagged.

V had seen enough. She got the rope off her head and neck, then broke it from her ankles and wrists. The crystal on her neck made a metalic ringing. She beat it down the road, down the trail, to the backyard where she crashed into the door and barged into the kitchen. She told her about the old man and the hound.

Her mother was furious at her. She didn’t listen even as dark clouds gathered outside. Even as V pointed to the spot where it happened, where the fence was down.

The crystal turned black.

The fencing outside had huge holes in it, like something had taken a big bite out of it.

At the back door, V heard it.

Scratch

Scratch

Scratch.

“Go upstairs.” her mother said.

“Why? Is that…”

Her mother grabbed the knife and pushed her daughter into the pantry.

She peeked out the window. There stood an old man, open wounds on his hands and arms. A hound at his heels. The dog panted.

“He doesn’t bite.”

The Alchemist

The Alchemist 

by Graham Swanson

A second body was found one hundred years after the first one. A mercury arc rectifier burst at the old electric plant. But it was no accident. 

It takes 5 seconds to die in liquid mercury. First it causes the skin to boil until it melts off, then it causes eyeballs to explode. A person with these burns can still be saved however. The fatal stage is asphyxiation. It damages the respiratory pathways from the mouth and nostrils to the lungs and stomach. The body goes unconscious, and death follows. 

The first body they found died in about 5 seconds. They knew it was no accident. He didn’t slip and fall. He was dipped by the ankles, pulled out, dipped in again until the skin peeled from his face, and finally dropped inside where he sank to the bottom, and was dead before the sludge from the body even arose to the surface. 

The second body survived for 15 seconds. 

Rumor among the strange folk was that what we call liquid mercury has been known since the times of Ancient Egypt, and is actually the seed water of Gods. A Detective examining the remains found the two dead bodies didn’t behave as how victims of chemical burns should. The mercury hardened into shapes of horned creatures, or solid chains. He looked deeper into the tissue. He found FINGERS that clasped around the wrists of the dead.

The bodies seemed to not only regenerate, but grow strange things. Like a shield of bone around the chest that covered the neck and chin. 

They tried to incinerate the bodies, but no matter the temperature, the corpses remained intact. 

Puzzled, he turned to an Alchemist who hid out where no one could interrupt his experiments. A place with no electricty, where timezones don't add up. The Alchemist laughed when he told him the story. He didn’t explain the behavior of mercury like how the Detective expected. Instead the old man brought out a crumbling book from the Renaissance. Inside were dense paragraphs in old Greek on one page with a Latin copy on the other page. Notes were scribbled inside for an English translation someday. But what the Alchemist showed him were pictures of terrible monsters, and silver bowls at the throats of warriors.

"They called it Liquid Silver. It's older than Rome. Older than Egypt. Older than the names of Gods. Human weapons don’t work against them. They had to use a secret power from the heavens. Liquid Silver is what they use to defeat them in their war with the Underworld.” 

The Alchemist pointed to the hand made drawings of ferocious toothed, winged faery creatures, with the heads of birds, and the udders and horns of cattle. 

When the Detective returned, the bodies had changed even more. They grew wings, spikes, spear heads, armored collars. The only explanation he could think of came from the words of the Alchemist. That in the times when man waged war with the underworld, that human warriors would swallow liquid mercury and transform into a warrior capable of fighting the demons. 

The Detective looked at the straight pearl white teeth of the corpses. They seemed to snarl at him. 

The Detective turned back to old lore from the Alchemist. The Alchemist stood by the glass tubes that contained blue sprites of energy. A mercury rectifier arc. He explained to the Detective that before roads and powerlines, once winged demons- or terrible angels- scoured the plains, and lay ruin to the hamlets and cottages of their ancestors. 

“Look into the rectifier”  The Alchemist bade him. 

The Detective was compelled to do so as he heard screams and ancient languages coming from the blue energy placed between the glass cylinders. What he saw inside looked like the corpses with their wings and spears, but more refined, emerging from the fumes, suddenly every memory of growing up in these plains- his friends, school, the playground- HE was there. His eyes were wheels of fire. His voice a trumpet blast. His hand, cold to the touch. He soared over their heads as the moon floats over entire hills of ants. 

The creature the detective saw in the rectifier was not limited to inside the room. He also existed outside and beyond. Within his very consciousness, and without its abysmal presence, he feared he could no longer return to a life unknowing what the Alchemist had shown him in the glass. 

“That there is the God of the Underworld! What we call liquid mercury is sap from his offspring.”

The Detective hurried back to where the bodies were kept cold, and locked away. However when he got to the mortuary, he found the windows shattered, the door blown off the hinges by the wind, and a huge hole in the roof. The hole went through the floor below, to the basement, where even the drawers where they keep bodies were torn open, and the dead were left to walk free. 

The two corpses were gone. 

The Detective remembered the lore of a village destroyed by the angels. He hurried to get there. Its best days had passed. The homes sank into the earth, heaps of bricks still lay in the grass. Walls of broken down cars and farm equipment stood against the side of the uneven, dirt road. Strange folk with black eyes stood on their porches with pitchforks. He stopped his car.

"Where did they go?"

An old woman pointed a long gnarled finger towards the fields.

On the edge of the fields was a crater.

Records told of a tornado that tore the sky open, uprooted the trees, and leveled the homes down to the foundation. However the old folk seemed to recognize the shadows of the demons that swept overhead. They told stories of lightning that struck so hard that it vaporized the trees, houses, and people. The Detective came to the crater in the ground where the storm hit so hard that it vaporized everything its lightning touched. In the middle he saw curtains of debris and mist and dust sweep across, and in the middle stood another mercury rectifier arc. One bigger than any human hand can manufacture. Blue light poured from the glass cylinders. He heard a scream from within. He saw the perfect teeth inside.He saw a smile.

Then it occured to him. That the bodies had not DIED in the mercury. They had been RECHARGING.

There and then he saw the wings cut through the gusts of shadow and murk. He saw himself flying over the hamlets, looking down at the people, remembering how small they once appeared to the mighty warriors of the sky, how much he remembered enjoying seeing it from flight.

   The Detective heard his own voice in the blue light. A creature stepped forward. Behind him something landed hard. Then another, and another. Until the moon vaporised in a cloud of blue light. Across the fields and praries,old machines began to wake up.