Notes from the Turkeyground: 12 Turkeys

For the twelfth year, I present my survey of new turkeylands explored during November. Most years, I've found the first movie watched is an omen of things to come. If we're fortunate enough to watch a good one, especially if it's unexpectedly good, it's going to be a fun challenge. If we start with something awful, well, hard to get the sand out of the vaseline. This year, we started with 4/20 Massacre, a movie about a bunch of college girls who go out to the woods to talk about feminism and queer issues. Unfortunately for them, there's a secret crop of weed in that forest and a ninja-suited murdered who will protect it to the death! It's bad. It's shot bad. The dialogue is awful. Worst of all, it's not funny. A movie called '4/20 Massacre' needs to be funny. They also lied and said the OKC bombing happened on 4/20. In fact, that's the day they caught Timothy McVeigh. The bombing happened on 4/19.

But y'know what? Maybe my old Turkey's Almanac prognostication doesn't hold up. We has some fun ones next. The Craft: Legacy is a goofy but fun continuation of The Craft story. Also, the second movie in the row that's obsessed with feminism and queer issues. It's like a bunch of low-budget screenwriters found a Master Class on youtube that instructed them to be more woke. There were no feminist, queer, nor issues of any kind in Zombie Tidal Wave, Ferrante's follow-up to the Sharknado series. The brain goes off for this one. It plays exactly like a Sharknado movie, but with fewer cameos.

Where most years we cherry-pick our movies for points, this year we went through our Turkeys DVR folder and just watched whatever. We were at like 70% harddrive capacity. So a slew of forgettable movies, like another version of Turn of the Screw with Finn Wolfhard, a zombie movie whose big headliner star is Michael Dudikoff (they couldn't even get Eric Roberts?!), and ugh... Aquaslash. Aquaslash, which should've been a cringe-inducing gorefest about razorblades all over a waterpark is actually 70 minutes of insipid drama leading to a single, 5-6 minute gore scene. That's it. We followed with The Gallows: Act II. We thought we'd be playing it safe with a Blumhouse movie. I hated The Gallows. The sequel is a pretty good mix of supernatural cat-and-mouse.

Speaking of playing it safe, what's safer than Larry muthafuckin Cohen? One of my favorite filmmakers. We had never seen Wicked Stepmother. It had Bette Davis. How could it be bad? Well, it isn't. If you enjoy Larry Cohen at all. If you don't, you might not 'get it.' But we all get Larry here, right? Fun story about this movie is Bette Davis did NOT get Larry. She didn't know what he was doing or why he was doing it. So she, uh, just left. She went to get some dental work done and never came back to the set. So Larry has her change into some broad with huge bazooms about halfway through. The Bette Davis scenes are still great, because she's Bette being Bette. But the topless scenes work much better with Busty McGee.

Let's see... I'm not going to cover every movie. So I'll skip over the bigfoot rape movie (Primal Rage), the Hostel knockoff (Anarchy Parlor), yet another awful 'musical prodigy pushed too hard' thriller (Ambition), and skip right to one of the few trifectas we did do this year: the great Barbara Crampton. She disappeared for a while, but now she's back and doing b-movies. Sacrifice (2020) is about a couple that return to the husband's childhood home of some-Norweigian-island, where they have strange customs and argue with you about whether calamari counts as seafood. Barbara shows up as the island's sheriff. And yes, she does a Norweigian accent. "My hoos-bawnd." Most of the movie's 'good' moments are dream-sequences. It's strange, has its moments, tries too hard to be intellectual. Dead Night, our next Babs movie, is even stranger. Veering back and forth from bizarre zombie-like murders in a family's wilderness cabin and an Investigation Discovery show profiling the murders after the fact, you'd think there aren't my surprises. But there are. Crampton plays a candidate for governor whose campaign strategy involves playing dead in the snow and sacrificing people to a rock. Finally, Day of Reckoning, about hordes of creatures that emerge from beneath the Earth's crust thanks to drilling operations. They kill millions of people, then disappear for 15 years. But... they're coming back! Why did we just leave the drill site open for 15 years, you ask? 'cause those bad CG monsters have to come outta somewheres!! Crampton is a survivalist nut's wife here, a pretty bland role for her usual tastes.

We had enough new movies, so we decided, hwo about some old-timey turkeys? Kiss of the Tarantula, about a girl who murders with her league of spiders was first. An odd, incestuous '70s movie. Kind of a snooze-fest. If you manage to stay awake for that, though, ohhh boy, because Death Curse of Tartu was next. A movie that simulates the feeling if being dragged through the everglades. Now I know Death Curse of Tartu is an influential and favorite of '60s regional cinema. Especially if you're from Florida. It's really, really boring. It does have some zen charm, though. Scalps, Fred Olen Ray's tribute to Death Curse, was much more enjoyable for me. And Rattlers, a killer snake movie where no actor ever has contact with a snake. I've never seen people so menaced by stock footage. And just as the movie is hurtling toward the climax, the main guy and girl go to Vegas and have a long date night montage! It's like they saw a Ray Dennis Steckler movie and thought, "Yes, this is how you make a film!"


The best movies of the challenge came toward the end. Killer High, a fun and witty SyFy movie about a boar monster loose in a shitty high school reunion. Lots of good one-liners, kills, and silliness. I Am Lisa, an underrated werewolf movie about an outcast bullied by the local corrupt sheriff and her family. They leave her for dead. Too bad for them, she done gone werewolf. Letters to Satan Claus, another SyFy movie that paraodies Hallmark Christmas movies. A girl returns to her small hometown of Ornaments, where everyone is obsessed with Christmas. And she notices, there's a lot of dick in town worth riding. Damn Satan gets in the way, though, and starts killing all her best lays. Will she learn the meaning of Christmas so she can finally get boned? It's crude, 'subversive', and has a lot of fun doing it. My favorite of the challenge, though, is the latest Black Christmas remake. Everybody hated this movie. Why? It's full of over-the-top woke dialogue, obvious alpha male villains, the absurdist evil cult I've seen in a while, and Imogen Poots looking stoned out of her mind the entire movie. It's amazing. Lastly, Black Friday, Bruce Campbell's new movie about Black Friday shoppers gone mad... with alien goo! Competent b-movie with good humor.

Worst movie of the challenge? That has to go to Verotika. The main actress is a whole lot of eye candy. There are some really cool costumes and ideas. I guess that's why it annoyed me the most. All of the incompetence that ruined what could've been great. For one, he has no idea when to cut. A scene with two cops talking took like 3 minutes. The last minute was watching them just stand there. Is it a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard that I'm missing? I mean, the whole movie is set in France, where everyone speaks not in French but in atrocious French accents. So maybe it is. Except Godard didn't do that shit, Antonioni did! It should've been set in Rome. Anyway, the accents are bad. The audio echoes randomly, because it was recorded in a high school gymnasium apparently. And nobody can act. Not even eyes for nipples could save this movie.

All-in-all, it was a good challenge. We took it light this year, but what we lacked in quantity we made up for in quality. I want to leave you all with a heart-warming turkey story before I go. When I was about 11 years old, living in a small fishing village on the east coast of Quebec, a new video rental store opened in town. Super VideoTeck [sic]. They had all kinds of horror movies the mom-n-pop place didn't. So for a sleepover, my friend and I rented one. We picked Hobgoblins. We thought, hey, this'll just be Ghoulies 2 with fewer toilets. Instead, it was an epic of garden tool fights, old man fu, and cheesy jokes. We were young enough, we enjoyed it for what it was. I finally got to watch it again, 26 years later, and I enjoyed it. I know it gained a reputation as a terrible movie. But hey, it's a z-budget movie where the jokes as written actually land sometimes. That's rare. So I wrote Rick Sloane on facebook to let him know. He replied the next day to tell me he appreciated the message. I never imagined, when I was 11 and watching that incredible fight with the garden tools, that someday the director of that movie would write me. Aren't you glad you stayed for this story?

Until next year!