Dec 2019
Another year, another Turkey Challenge come and gone. The older I get, the more bittersweet that is. On the one hand, I can finally watch whatever the hell I want again. On the other, there’s something magical about this challenge. We look forward to it all year and it brings us true joy while we play. You know why it brings joy? Because it brings liberation. All year, watching a movie like Miami Magma might feel like a waste of time, but during that one month, we can watch and enjoy that movie free of considerations like, “Shouldn’t we be watching Midsommer? Everyone says it’s brilliant.” Well I bid all you Midsommer enthusiasts to ask, “Shouldn’t we be watching Miami Magma?”
Every year brings a different experience. I try not to judge and compare to previous years. Each Turkey Challenge stands alone. The rules are mostly the same, but the movies change. Sometimes you choose a string of really good movies that just have low budgets. Sometimes you choose a string of David DeCoteau movies instead. To a certain extent, you get out of the challenge what you put into it. It pays to have a few movies stockpiled, preferably ordered as trifectas from a single director. This year, we kinda winged it, because we had 80 random turkeys sitting on the DVR.
But at least we started with a class act! The Fred Olen Ray underappreciated masterpiece, Beverly Hills Vamp, was how we started. The perfect mix of dumb jokes, nice tiddies, and vampires. We weren’t asking why, we just felt like watching it. Probably for the tenth time in my case. We only thought after, “Hey, how can we make some extra points off this movie?” Michelle Bauer would be the obvious one. But we wanted to watch Gary Graver’s Moon in Scorpio for Veteran’s Day, since it was about Vietnam vets encountering the ghost of past mistakes on a cramped sailboat. So we went with the obscure blonde Jillian Kesner. These movies are connected by more than just Kesner. Gary Graver was Fred Olen Ray’s cinematographer and Moon in Scorpio was shot back-to-back with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. To finish the Kesner trifecta, we watched, oh boy, Graver’s Trick or Treats later in the month. Trick or Treats stars Graver’s son as a horrible kid who’s into magic tricks and uses them to torture his sexy babysitter. Meanwhile, his crazy father (the great Peter Jason) escapes the loony bin and comes looking for blood: babysitter blood!
You see how we meandered through that trifecta? Well, that’s how much of the challenge went. It had mixed results. We had a better time with Johannes Roberts. We stumbled onto him because his evil gypsy curse/monster bird/crazy backwoods rednecks movie, Roadkill, was on the DVR. Any movie combining all those subgenres is gonna be good, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Also, while all the girls had a no-nudity clause, Roberts had a no-small-tiddies clause, so we at least get some good sweater puppies bouncing around during chase scenes. Good, dumb fun. We watched two earlier films of his expecting—well, I didn’t know what to expect, but not what I got. Somehow, despite being on an obvious micro-budget, he manages to afford serious actors like Sean Pertwee and Jeff Fahey and that little guy from Alien: Resurrection. The French guy. When Evil Calls is about a mysterious text message that goes viral in a single high school. It asks you to make a wish. Naturally they all wish for dumb things and die. It’s like 26 short movies that work as episodes in a single story. I think it was a Youtube miniseries. Next was Darkhunters, about dead people who think they’re still alive so cats and demonic bounty hunters follow them everywhere. Roberts is a low-budget success story: he went on to direct 47 Meters Down and the new Strangers movie.
Another good one was the Brothers Kondelik. Again, we had a movie of theirs on the DVR, Jurassic Galaxy! Dinosaurs in space, what can go wrong? Despite a 2.2 rating, the movie blended decent storytelling, fun characters, a sense of humor. Sure, it had no tits, but it was still fun. Similarly, Dam Sharks!, their shark movie. You always know a SyFy movie is going to be good if Jason or Jeremy London is playing a massive asshole in it. This is one of them! The last Kondelik film we watched wasn’t as goofy as the others. In fact, it’s a serious haunted house flick, Behind the Walls. Why this movie is so underrated, I don’t know. It’s one of the most inventive low-budget haunted house movies I’ve seen in a long time. How many haunted house movies have a climax involving tentacles? Outside of hentai, I mean. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
I thought I could get us some class in the challenge by doing a Christopher Lee trifecta. The first movie made me think that was a good idea. Panga AKA The Curse III, while a stupid movie, has a great setting, some fun shamanic terror, and Christopher Lee in an active role. Mask of Murder, by the legendary Arne Mattson, is a bland, bland whodunit where you already know who done did it! Rod Taylor’s performance in this movie is riveting, though. Nobody ever talks about Rod Taylor as an actor. He’s just a “handsome, leading man,” but Taylor could act. Oh, then Meatcleaver Massacre, where Lee is just an on-screen narrator lending respectability to a surprisingly thoughtful film given the lurid title. It delves into Pagan mythology and revenge deities in its exploration of just why murderous punks should be murdered by anything other than a meatcleaver. These are college students, though. Isn’t that a little late to be murderous punks? Like, they could just drop the class if they hate it that much. Go become a welder or something. Nobody’s forcing them to study Celtic mythology.
In a similar vein, we spent some time with Kent Taylor. Starting with the spooky, kinda disturbing The Day Mars Invaded Earth. A riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers on a much smaller scale, it’s actually kinda creepier. Martians are invisible psychic forces that can assume shape at well. They’re especially fond of the Kent Taylor shape. The Crawling Hand was a wild ride, almost involving that devilish planet Mars. This time it tries to kill Kent Taylor with a possessed hand. The hand didn’t count on the two bumbling bureaucrats from the Space Agency, though! For our third movie, we had no choice: it was time to go into Terra Al Adamsonia. I have a soft spot for Al Adamson, so I won’t go too hard on Brain of Blood, a movie about uhhh, the Sultan of a fictional Arabic nation who comes to America to put his brain in a young man’s body, but the doctor is evil and puts it in a disfigured idiot’s body, and there are spies, and rooftop chases, and—y’know, there’s just way too much plot getting in the way of this movie. But that’s because most Al Adamson movies are six movies that accidentally got spliced together.
We also had a series of one-offs. One-offs are risky. Because the director who makes a single low-budget horror movie and then leaves the film business to be a manager at the local Kroger is probably not gonna give us much to work with. With The House on Skull Mountain, that’s not the case. I think it may be my favorite find of the challenge. You know how the ‘70s was full of these blaxsploitation horror movies? Like, Sugar Hill and Blackula? You know how those movies kinda suck? The House on Skull Mountain is black horror movie that is *not* blaxploitation and it’s actually good. They use the old trick of assembling a bunch of heirs for the reading of a will. None of them are particularly concerned that the mansion is on a mountain shaped like a skull. Typical Georgian landscaping, I guess. Do they even have cliffs like that in Georgia? Anyway, three of the heirs are black and one of them is the very white Victor French, with full Mark Twain ‘stache. They soon find themselves caught in the web of the butler-cum-voodoo master. But it’s all about heritage. Except for the weird, romantic montage between cousins, it’s a charming picture.
Another favorite is Dead Ant, a victim of a complete lack of advertising, I think. By next year, it’ll be rated 5.5, mark ye my words. But this year, it’s 4.9 and we got to enjoy a washed up ‘80s hair band (is there any other kind?) fighting giant ants summoned by cursed peyote. Yeah, that old trope! While they’re busy composing their new epic Side Boob and hitting on barely legal bimbos, the ants plot their doom. Will they ever get to Nochella in time to entertain all 50 attendees? If you’re in the right mood, the jokes in this movie really land. You just gotta believe there are people this stupid. Believe!
And the last one-off I wanted to mention, because it’s just so weird: The Shaft. Now, it doesn’t seem weird at first glance. It’s directed by cult director Dick Maas, remaking his own classic De Lift. It has Naomi Watts, Edward Hermann, Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman and Dan Hedaya. But when you start watching it, you think, “So this was made by an alien who came to Earth and studied American culture for about a week, right?” Because the dialogue, behavior, and overall states of being of everyone in this movie is strangely out of touch with reality. It reminds me of other European movies that pretend to be American, like Gingerclown. Or The Room. Except, this movie is otherwise really competent. The cinematography and editing are fantastic with wry humor. And the actors struggle to give life to absurdist characters. Naomi Watts in particular has to struggle with the Plucky 1950s Journalist character who says things like, “I’ll pee on them” and thinks sexual harassment is part of the job. The flirtation between James Marshall and Naomi Watts is more disturbing than the elevator deaths. With a good screenwriter to touch it up, this could’ve been a masterpiece. Instead, it’s a weird, weird, but also charming oddity.
We ended the Challenge this year with an unconventional choice, something we’ve never done before: we turned to disaster movie turkeys! Yes, the low-budget disaster movie, one of the most maligned sub-subgenres, because they’re like SyFy monster movies without the monsters. The only step lower is the dreaded Hallmark movie. But that’s where people are wrong. These *are* SyFy monster movies. The monsters are just the ones we’ve created by our rampant disrespect of Mother Nature. That’s why we enjoy seeing literally TENS of extras devastated by the Seattle Superstorm! Models of Washington monuments obliterated by Stacy Keach’s Storm Wars! And, of course, douchebag oil tycoons melted by Miami Magma. Those last two were written by Griff Furst, my favorite SyFy guy. I actually wished we’d been doing disaster movies the whole challenge, because they were a lot of fun! And, well, there are a lot of them and they’re free everywhere because nobody’s willing to pay for them.
Overall, it was a great challenge this year. I thank Zombie_CPA for creating this challenge and keeping it going, and TrashEpics for giving it a home. And thank YOU for reading all this. Gobble, gobble.
Every year brings a different experience. I try not to judge and compare to previous years. Each Turkey Challenge stands alone. The rules are mostly the same, but the movies change. Sometimes you choose a string of really good movies that just have low budgets. Sometimes you choose a string of David DeCoteau movies instead. To a certain extent, you get out of the challenge what you put into it. It pays to have a few movies stockpiled, preferably ordered as trifectas from a single director. This year, we kinda winged it, because we had 80 random turkeys sitting on the DVR.
But at least we started with a class act! The Fred Olen Ray underappreciated masterpiece, Beverly Hills Vamp, was how we started. The perfect mix of dumb jokes, nice tiddies, and vampires. We weren’t asking why, we just felt like watching it. Probably for the tenth time in my case. We only thought after, “Hey, how can we make some extra points off this movie?” Michelle Bauer would be the obvious one. But we wanted to watch Gary Graver’s Moon in Scorpio for Veteran’s Day, since it was about Vietnam vets encountering the ghost of past mistakes on a cramped sailboat. So we went with the obscure blonde Jillian Kesner. These movies are connected by more than just Kesner. Gary Graver was Fred Olen Ray’s cinematographer and Moon in Scorpio was shot back-to-back with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. To finish the Kesner trifecta, we watched, oh boy, Graver’s Trick or Treats later in the month. Trick or Treats stars Graver’s son as a horrible kid who’s into magic tricks and uses them to torture his sexy babysitter. Meanwhile, his crazy father (the great Peter Jason) escapes the loony bin and comes looking for blood: babysitter blood!
You see how we meandered through that trifecta? Well, that’s how much of the challenge went. It had mixed results. We had a better time with Johannes Roberts. We stumbled onto him because his evil gypsy curse/monster bird/crazy backwoods rednecks movie, Roadkill, was on the DVR. Any movie combining all those subgenres is gonna be good, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Also, while all the girls had a no-nudity clause, Roberts had a no-small-tiddies clause, so we at least get some good sweater puppies bouncing around during chase scenes. Good, dumb fun. We watched two earlier films of his expecting—well, I didn’t know what to expect, but not what I got. Somehow, despite being on an obvious micro-budget, he manages to afford serious actors like Sean Pertwee and Jeff Fahey and that little guy from Alien: Resurrection. The French guy. When Evil Calls is about a mysterious text message that goes viral in a single high school. It asks you to make a wish. Naturally they all wish for dumb things and die. It’s like 26 short movies that work as episodes in a single story. I think it was a Youtube miniseries. Next was Darkhunters, about dead people who think they’re still alive so cats and demonic bounty hunters follow them everywhere. Roberts is a low-budget success story: he went on to direct 47 Meters Down and the new Strangers movie.
Another good one was the Brothers Kondelik. Again, we had a movie of theirs on the DVR, Jurassic Galaxy! Dinosaurs in space, what can go wrong? Despite a 2.2 rating, the movie blended decent storytelling, fun characters, a sense of humor. Sure, it had no tits, but it was still fun. Similarly, Dam Sharks!, their shark movie. You always know a SyFy movie is going to be good if Jason or Jeremy London is playing a massive asshole in it. This is one of them! The last Kondelik film we watched wasn’t as goofy as the others. In fact, it’s a serious haunted house flick, Behind the Walls. Why this movie is so underrated, I don’t know. It’s one of the most inventive low-budget haunted house movies I’ve seen in a long time. How many haunted house movies have a climax involving tentacles? Outside of hentai, I mean. Yeah, that’s what I thought.
I thought I could get us some class in the challenge by doing a Christopher Lee trifecta. The first movie made me think that was a good idea. Panga AKA The Curse III, while a stupid movie, has a great setting, some fun shamanic terror, and Christopher Lee in an active role. Mask of Murder, by the legendary Arne Mattson, is a bland, bland whodunit where you already know who done did it! Rod Taylor’s performance in this movie is riveting, though. Nobody ever talks about Rod Taylor as an actor. He’s just a “handsome, leading man,” but Taylor could act. Oh, then Meatcleaver Massacre, where Lee is just an on-screen narrator lending respectability to a surprisingly thoughtful film given the lurid title. It delves into Pagan mythology and revenge deities in its exploration of just why murderous punks should be murdered by anything other than a meatcleaver. These are college students, though. Isn’t that a little late to be murderous punks? Like, they could just drop the class if they hate it that much. Go become a welder or something. Nobody’s forcing them to study Celtic mythology.
In a similar vein, we spent some time with Kent Taylor. Starting with the spooky, kinda disturbing The Day Mars Invaded Earth. A riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers on a much smaller scale, it’s actually kinda creepier. Martians are invisible psychic forces that can assume shape at well. They’re especially fond of the Kent Taylor shape. The Crawling Hand was a wild ride, almost involving that devilish planet Mars. This time it tries to kill Kent Taylor with a possessed hand. The hand didn’t count on the two bumbling bureaucrats from the Space Agency, though! For our third movie, we had no choice: it was time to go into Terra Al Adamsonia. I have a soft spot for Al Adamson, so I won’t go too hard on Brain of Blood, a movie about uhhh, the Sultan of a fictional Arabic nation who comes to America to put his brain in a young man’s body, but the doctor is evil and puts it in a disfigured idiot’s body, and there are spies, and rooftop chases, and—y’know, there’s just way too much plot getting in the way of this movie. But that’s because most Al Adamson movies are six movies that accidentally got spliced together.
We also had a series of one-offs. One-offs are risky. Because the director who makes a single low-budget horror movie and then leaves the film business to be a manager at the local Kroger is probably not gonna give us much to work with. With The House on Skull Mountain, that’s not the case. I think it may be my favorite find of the challenge. You know how the ‘70s was full of these blaxsploitation horror movies? Like, Sugar Hill and Blackula? You know how those movies kinda suck? The House on Skull Mountain is black horror movie that is *not* blaxploitation and it’s actually good. They use the old trick of assembling a bunch of heirs for the reading of a will. None of them are particularly concerned that the mansion is on a mountain shaped like a skull. Typical Georgian landscaping, I guess. Do they even have cliffs like that in Georgia? Anyway, three of the heirs are black and one of them is the very white Victor French, with full Mark Twain ‘stache. They soon find themselves caught in the web of the butler-cum-voodoo master. But it’s all about heritage. Except for the weird, romantic montage between cousins, it’s a charming picture.
Another favorite is Dead Ant, a victim of a complete lack of advertising, I think. By next year, it’ll be rated 5.5, mark ye my words. But this year, it’s 4.9 and we got to enjoy a washed up ‘80s hair band (is there any other kind?) fighting giant ants summoned by cursed peyote. Yeah, that old trope! While they’re busy composing their new epic Side Boob and hitting on barely legal bimbos, the ants plot their doom. Will they ever get to Nochella in time to entertain all 50 attendees? If you’re in the right mood, the jokes in this movie really land. You just gotta believe there are people this stupid. Believe!
And the last one-off I wanted to mention, because it’s just so weird: The Shaft. Now, it doesn’t seem weird at first glance. It’s directed by cult director Dick Maas, remaking his own classic De Lift. It has Naomi Watts, Edward Hermann, Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman and Dan Hedaya. But when you start watching it, you think, “So this was made by an alien who came to Earth and studied American culture for about a week, right?” Because the dialogue, behavior, and overall states of being of everyone in this movie is strangely out of touch with reality. It reminds me of other European movies that pretend to be American, like Gingerclown. Or The Room. Except, this movie is otherwise really competent. The cinematography and editing are fantastic with wry humor. And the actors struggle to give life to absurdist characters. Naomi Watts in particular has to struggle with the Plucky 1950s Journalist character who says things like, “I’ll pee on them” and thinks sexual harassment is part of the job. The flirtation between James Marshall and Naomi Watts is more disturbing than the elevator deaths. With a good screenwriter to touch it up, this could’ve been a masterpiece. Instead, it’s a weird, weird, but also charming oddity.
We ended the Challenge this year with an unconventional choice, something we’ve never done before: we turned to disaster movie turkeys! Yes, the low-budget disaster movie, one of the most maligned sub-subgenres, because they’re like SyFy monster movies without the monsters. The only step lower is the dreaded Hallmark movie. But that’s where people are wrong. These *are* SyFy monster movies. The monsters are just the ones we’ve created by our rampant disrespect of Mother Nature. That’s why we enjoy seeing literally TENS of extras devastated by the Seattle Superstorm! Models of Washington monuments obliterated by Stacy Keach’s Storm Wars! And, of course, douchebag oil tycoons melted by Miami Magma. Those last two were written by Griff Furst, my favorite SyFy guy. I actually wished we’d been doing disaster movies the whole challenge, because they were a lot of fun! And, well, there are a lot of them and they’re free everywhere because nobody’s willing to pay for them.
Overall, it was a great challenge this year. I thank Zombie_CPA for creating this challenge and keeping it going, and TrashEpics for giving it a home. And thank YOU for reading all this. Gobble, gobble.
