Friday 5 December 2008

Poultrygeist

Chinese DVD guys are funny, you'll either get a 50's western in place of a recent Ricky Gervais film (there are two Ghost Towns apparently) or you find yourself with a total gem like Troma's latest release, Poultrygeist. It's been out for about six months in America but I don't think it's ever come out here so I'll fill you in. The movie concerns Arbie -a bespectacled, underweight wise-guy/hater- and his relationship with his high school sweetheart Wendy, who goes away to college and becomes a left wing, liberal, lipstick lesbian, much to Arbie's shagrin. Arbie first finds out about her new lifestyle choice when he sees her at a protest to prevent mega-conglomerate fast food franchise, the American Chicken Bunker, from building a restaurant on Tromaville's ancient Indian burial ground. Broken hearted, Arbie decides to get a job at American Chicken Bunker just to piss off his ex. Of couse, the courses of things built on ancient Indian burial grounds tend not to run smoothly, and hilarity/gore ensues. Oh yeah, did I mention this was a musical as well?


This is the coolest, most interesting movie I've seen for so long, the targets of the jokes are both kneejerk liberalism and merciless capitalism, the characters are outrageously cartoonish but still caricature their real-life equivalents perfectly and most of the time I found myself wondering how they made the monsters and effects, which I guess is intended to be part of the fun. Everything from the bizarely anal and a bit racist tagline (check out the poster) to the fat guy shitting his skeleton out of his arsehole to Arbie's general attitude screams 'really cool and clever nerds having fun making fun of everyone and everything', which is the best type of fun-making there is. I'm not really a film guy, but maybe that's because in Batman movies all you get are dead cokeheads acting intense for two hours, this is way more interesting.

Here's a trailer and one of the songs for you, Jiro can probably track down the whole film online somewhere -he's a master of Google Video, but I'm off to bed.





PS That's Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman lecturing Arbie on careers.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Troma films are the bomb, you gotta watch Class of Nuke Em High and Surf Nazis Must Die.

JIRO said...

Don't think it's on Google Video, but you can download it here

http://www.sharetera.com/movies/Poultrygeist-Night-Of-The-Chicken-Dead--2006--LIMITED-DVDRip-XviD-ESPiSE-8821.html

You do know about being able to download pretty much any film ever, just type the film, the year and rapidshare, it's just as good as the type album, band and the world blog thing, but with the films you've got to get a rapidshare account, but it's only about £4 for a month, and you can download a film in about 10 minutes.

Anonymous said...

ah - troma! I'm glad someone else has discovered them...

Terror Firmer was also an exciting Troma release - here's a link to my favourite scene. I won't let on what happens in it, it doesn't really take long before you get the jist of what's going on...

http://www.kewego.fr/video/iLyROoaftLsz.html