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There is a certain irony in this dyed-in-the-wool sickie. Y'see, it was made in Florida, the stomping grounds of the Godfather of Gore himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and it does his tradition proud. Oh, don't get me wrong, it isn't the film that Blood Feast is, or Two Thousand Maniacs, but it is weirder than anything that Lewis ever attempted (Something Weird and She Devils on Wheels not withstanding). Because....well, this is an anti-drug propaganda movie produced by Christian fundamentalists.

The video box on my edition of the film calls it "Dracula on Drugs," but that's giving the movie too much credit. What this movie is is a huge gory moralizing mess. Our protagonist, an Elvis-looking biker portrayed by Steve Hawkes, one of the film's directors, meets up with bible-reading Angel and helps her out on the highway. She takes him home, where her slattern sister, Ann, leads him astray into a world of drugs and poultry. After eating a turkey that has been laced with a bizarre super drug, he turns into a blood-sucking turkey monster.

That's right: A turkey monster.

I would describe the plot mechanisms that lead up to this and spin away from it, but the movie is simply incomprehensible, filled with non-sequiturs and repulsive gore scenes. Every so often, the film's OTHER director shows up as a narrator to guide the viewer to the uplifting moral message of the film. He does this with downcast eyes, as if he is reading from the script. These sequences bear unfavorable comparison to the Criswell sequences from Plan 9 from Outer Space or Night of the Ghouls--if only our narrator were as flamboyant as Criswell. Blood Freak has a grotty feeling to it that is both distasteful and heartwarming at the same time: distasteful because it is an eyesore of a movie, but heartwarming because so many memorable exploitation films are wrapped in the same kind of package. But unlike, say, a Deranged or a Basket Case (two movies that make grottiness an asset), Blood Freak doesn't turn that grottiness to advantage. Alas. This had the potential to resonate the way that an Eraserhead or a Reflecting Skin resonate, but it has no guiding artistic vision behind it, which is often the case with propaganda. And it's really too raw and bleeding an experience to function as a high camp object of derision. It just isn't that much fun to watch.

Sure is weird, though.