Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2007)
Troma Entertainment
Jason Yachanin and Kate Graham in “Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead,” directed by Lloyd Kaufman.
Going for the Finger-Licking Gusto
It’s opening day at the new American Chicken Bunker, and, as might be expected of a fast-food restaurant built atop an American Indian burial ground, things are going to hell. Outside, a group of protesters led by the frequently topless Collegiate Lesbians Against Mega-Conglomerations (CLAM) vents its outrage at the perpetuators of the chicken holocaust.
Inside, Paco Bell (Khalid Rivera) has met with an “accident” while surreptitiously adding his own special sauce to a mélange of fetid chicken parts, and Carl Jr. (Caleb Emerson) is lethally impaled by a mop after attempting some hanky-panky with the reanimated corpse of a slimy roaster.
“The chicken,” shrieks the burqa-clad line cook Humus (Rose Ghavami), “has declared jihad on us all!”
Needless to say, “Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead”is not for every taste. But within the context of its genre — the satirical sexploitation zombie chicken gross-out musical extravaganza — it is just about as perfect as a film predicated on the joys of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea can be. Directed with finger-licking gusto by Lloyd Kaufman, the irrepressible co-founder of Troma Entertainment, “Poultrygeist” plays like a grindhouse analogue to the sloppy, psychosexual provocations of the performance artist Paul McCarthy and is, in its lowbrow way, every bit as liberating.