Poultrygeist (2007)
Friday, January 11th, 2008
Directed by: Lloyd Kaufman
Written By: Daniel Bova & Gabriel Friedman
Cast: Jason Yachanin, Kate Graham, & Allyson Sereboff
Runtime: 103 min.
Rating: R
Trailer
There is a thin line between satire and stupidity. If there is one film proving that old adage, it is Lloyd Kaufman’s scatological farce, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, a film so vile and ill begotten it feels like an endless, punishing trip into the mind of a sex-obsessed 16-year-old boy, despite the 90-minute running time. Say what you will about director Lloyd Kaufman’s political and social affiliations, the man cannot string a narrative together to save his skin. Where once he mixed satire, social action, and a strong political message in films back in the mid-eighties, like The Toxic Avenger, these days, Kaufman can barely sustain the threadbare plot of Poultrygeist without resorting to an assortment of musical numbers disguised as character exposition and motivation – a telling, if not all together surprising, trait of the narratively-challenged. What ostensibly is a zombie movie - albeit with chickens instead of humans - feels like a bloated, exaggerated, and tediously dull exercise in intellectual immaturity.
The plot, or more appropriately, what constitutes as the plot for the first two thirds of the movie, deals with the opening of a fast food chicken restaurant built on top of an old Native American burial site, and the subsequent protests of a left-wing, liberal, lesbian activist group named C.L.A.M. (get it?). Spirits possess the chickens and before you can find the theatre’s exit signs, all hell reigns loose on the small restaurant as chicken/zombie hybrids begin a disgusting and politically incorrect assault on our senses and on our hero, Arbie (Jason Yachanin), and his lesbian girlfriend, Wendy (Kate Graham) (get it?). Because of the film’s reluctance to conform to mainstream cinema’s materialistic cajoling, some of the film’s intransigent supporters praise Poultrygeist as “outsider art”, which is a term stretching the intelligence and judgement of those aforementioned followers. Vile preoccupation with scatology and various vulgarities for the sake of baiting reaction does not constitute as art, however it is defined, let alone a good night out at the movies. As for constructing a satire commenting on the fast food industry and our obsessive and narcissistic lifestyle, Kaufman falls flat on his face.
Take, for example, the endless string of musical interludes during the first act. When not struggling to hear the often muddled and unintelligible lyrics, one finds himself in the midst of momentum crushing excursions devoid of melody or creative staging, which unfortunately leaves the lingering spirits of bad Saturday Night Live skits in its wake. It is almost as if Kaufman is so unsure of his storytelling abilities, he feels it necessary to have his characters sing the plot when he is stuck in a narrative rut. This kind of storytelling is as lazy and dull as the film’s cinematography. Kaufman and fellow screenwriters Daniel Bova and Gabriel Friedman are so single-mindedly determined to criticize and exploit everything from consumer culture and liberal, guilt-ridden activism to 9/11 and the War on Terrorism, that persistence is almost impressive if not so poorly executed. Then again, the act of throwing shit at the screen to see what sticks is so often connected to artistic persistence that I may have confused the two. The only joke I can recall working is a scene in which a lesbian activist makes an impassioned speech to the owner of the restaurant, General Lee Roy (Robin Watkins, in a scenery-chewing performance for the ages), on the evils of corporate greed and an apathetic public, only to stop halfway through to gulp down a Starbucks latte. The joke works because it does not wallow in satirical self-satisfaction like so much of Poultrygeist.
Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2008
