Quite possibly one of the most schizoid movies ever made -- "Blood Freak," made in 1971, bills itself as being about "A Dracula On Drugs!" but is actually an anti-drug mutant-monster movie.

I wish I were clever enough to make that up.

We'll start with the "plot." Herschell, a guy who looks surprisingly like Elvis in many scenes, happens by chance to meet a young Christian woman named Angel and her party girl sister Ann. Angel gets him a job at her dad's turkey farm and reads the Bible to him, but Ann tries to get him stoned and laid. And succeeds in both; after teasing him into trying a single toke of pot, he suddenly is laughing like a fool and jumping into bed with her the next minute. 24 hours later, he's an addict. While on the job at the turkey farm, Herschell is offered a chance at some extra cash -- eating a meal of some turkeys who have been raised with experimental hormones scientists at the farm have cooked up, to determine whether there are any side effects. He agrees, but after chowing down on an entire turkey (!), he suddenly collapses, has several seizures, and wakes up several hours later to find that he has been transformed into a turkey-headed monster. An ADDICT turkey-headed monster that can only get high by drinking the blood of other addicts. He comes back to Ann and Angel for help, then suddenly starts rampaging through town on a killing spree; Ann and her friends decide he needs to be killed to be put out of his misery, but at the very end -- remember, this is a Christian movie -- he is saved by faith in Jesus, and he and Ann get to walk off into the sunset together on the boardwalk at Miami Beach.

The plot is bad enough. But then there's the acting. Or lack thereof. From the look of it, the only professional actor in the crowd is the star, Steve Hawkes, whom I've learned made a name for himself previously playing Tarzan in a couple Spanish films. Hawkes also wrote and co-directed the film with Brad Grinter, who appears as the drug dealer and as the narrator (yes, there is a narrator; more on that in a minute) and who also seems to have some tiny degree of talent. The rest of the cast not only can't act, they don't even seem to have any conception whatsoever of what acting is supposed to look like. You've probably all seen grade school plays: people standing and reciting lines with utterly no inflection or emotion whatsoever. This is even worse. One poor woman in one scene not only can't emote, she's speaking too quietly to be picked up by the mikes in the room -- for an entire scene, she is a part of a conversation with four other people, but you can't hear a word she's saying.

Then there's the production. It looks like the whole thing was shot on a single home movie camera; the opening shots of Herschell on the highway are full of zoom shots, shaky shots, and a couple shots where the camera can't even find him in the traffic. The same single shot of Herschell "rampaging" through town (actually, it's just a shot of him walking slowly through bushes) is used four different times. The "turkey-head" monster effect is just a big fake head shoved on top of Herschell's head, and no matter how many times the film tries to make it look scary by zooming in on it with sudden dramatic music, it doesn't inspire any fear at all. (It actually looks more like a rooster than a turkey.)

There are also a few random scenes that I can only assume are supposed to look "arty" -- on Herschell's first day at the turkey farm he's late for work, but when he gets there, there is a good three-minute scene where he hangs around the turkey coop watching the turkeys and even trying to pet a couple before reporting to the boss. There's a montage of "Herschell's First Day At Work" set to what sounds like cute country music -- Herschell cleaning out barns, carrying turkeys back and forth, and gathering eggs. (IS there a market for turkey eggs?) The big climactic scene, where Ann's friends try to kill Herschell before he gets saved, there's suddenly a shot of a turkey getting its head chopped off, followed by a totally bizarre shot of Herschell's fake turkey head sitting next to a big roast turkey, followed by the hands of a number of people flying into the shot to pick apart the roast turkey.

An early scene makes it look like the filmmakers have some really interesting opinions about drug use -- it is Angel who meets Herschell first and brings him back home; as they walk in, she apologizes for it being such a "madhouse" because her sister is having one of her "crazy drug parties." There are several long shots of what the filmmakers must have intended to show the crazy activity at this drug party. However, all it looks like is a group of middle-aged people sitting around a coffee table chatting calmly. They all look quite polite, in fact. Occasionally the camera will zoom in on a joint in a person's hand. One woman takes a sniff out of a medicine bottle, and the camera zooms in real quick on that too. Whatever she sniffs has no discernible effect on her whatsoever. At one point the camera zooms in on someone's drink -- a glass of white wine sitting on a table. Crazy drug party indeed.

The narrator, however, is the best part. From time to time, we are treated to a shot of Grinter, wearing a very shiny purple shirt and sitting in a wood-paneled room and speaking directly to the camera to comment on the action. He keeps glancing down at his lap as he speaks, as if he's reading from a script. And such a script -- it sounds like the grandiose things Ed Wood used to write for Criswell to say in his own films. And such a delivery -- full of pregnant pauses and meaningful glances at the camera; and one hysterical moment when Grinter concludes one of his orations with the expression, "Right on!" But unbelievably, in all of these scenes where Grinter is lecturing the audience about "the dangers of using our bodies as mixing bowls for chemicals," the man is CHAIN SMOKING. He even breaks into a smoker's coughing fit towards the end of one scene, which neither he nor the cameraman make any effort to hide at all.

I recently saw an interview with Steve Hawkes, who described the making of this film as "a very dark period in my life." It takes some legwork to find this, but it is definitely worth it.

Rating: four out of five experimental drug-addicted turkeys.

Scene to watch for: Grinter's coughing fit after lecturing the audience about pouring chemicals into your body.

Things that make you go "Huh?": What the heck is that scene with the turkey head and the roast turkey about anyway?

Response From RinkWorks:

Wow. Just...WOW.