Well it’s turkey time again friends, and I have not seen Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving yet, so I have no opinion about it but I AM of the opinion that Blood Freak is a movie that should be aired on TV every Thanksgiving like The Wizard of OZ. (If TV still exists.)
The parallels between the two films are obvious.
One is about a simple farm girl from Kansas , whisked away upon her own imagination to a world strange and confusing, yet beautiful, only to return back to her own world, realizing that nothing can truly be as beautiful to her, as that place she calls home.
The other is about a wandering Elvis-looking guy who encounters a cute Christian hippy chick and falls in love with her, only to be seduced by her evil sister, to take drugs and work for their uncle’s turkey farm, where he has to eat a turkey full of drugs that turn him into an half man-half mutant turkey hybrid thing that craves the blood of pot smokers.
Both of these films end up with it being a dream. (I’ll let you figure out which one is Wizard of Oz and which one is Blood Freak. ) but only one of them was a perennial classic I used to enjoy with my dear departed Grandma Moose!
(That movie wasn’t Blood Freak, but who knows, Grandma Moose might have liked it. She was even weirder me.)
Now that you can legally posses pot in Ohio, and I am an Ohian, I think it’s important everybody be educated about the possible foibles you may encounter while consuming the demon weed:
1.You my develop vampiric tendencies.
2. You may have your head turned into a turkey head.
3. You may have a narrator who breaks out into coughing fits.(Watch Blood Freak, it happens.)
All true, but let’s talk about the guy from Blood Freak who played the absolute HELL out of Herschell, the turkey monster.
Herschell, the character, is named after Herschell Gordon Lewis, the “Godfather of Gore,” which is already great, but get this: The man who played him, Steve Hawkes, had a distinguished career of doing Tarzan rip offs! One of them was so illegal they couldn’t even call it a Tarzan movie and they called the character “Zan.” (Look it up, it’s true!)
Wikipedia, says the guy’s real name is Steve Sipek. A lion rescued him and it’s a whole big thing.
He had an animal sanctuary that worked out pretty well until a Bengal tiger escaped.
Still, he wasn’t killed by any big cats and he died at the ripe old age of 77, after having lived a long life, filled with protecting large cats. So, we should all be thankful for that!
And we should be thankful for his role as Herschell, the turkey vampire mutant in Blood Freak!
And if you actually read this, I’d like to thank you for being you!
We’ll get a paper mache turkey head and make the sequel!
Gobble gobble!
Leave a Reply