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Blood Freak (1972) More at IMDb Pro »

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15 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
CULT defined, 24 octobre 2003
Author: lost1-1 (lost1@earthlink.net) de lv nv

I get so emotional whenever I attempt to write a review about "Blood Freak". The last review I wrote was not accepted by IMDB as I got too out of line and my review degenerated into uncontrolled bantering. Just know that my love for this movie cannot be contained in mere words. "Blood Freak" is a must see by all. The movie itself is indeed a FREAK of nature. You'll never see a movie quite like it unless it's contrived and purposely-made camp. This film is as out-of-control as a serious filmmaker could get and still be trying to make an honest-to-God film with a real message. Never have I seen a pro-Jesus-anti-drug-murder-turkey-mutant-vampire movie. Brad Gritner and Steven Hawkes have succeeded in going beyond laughing-stock into a realm of unparrelled cult statis that which few will ever attain. I wont spoil one minute of this movie for you by recounting any of it, just know that it's impossible to find any movie more deserved of the cult genre than this one. Take the plunge and see this movie!!! You wont regret it!

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12 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
Blood-drinking turkey monster mania!, 8 mai 2003

Author: capkronos (capkronos@hotmail.com) de Ohio, USA

A very shaky camera follows leatherclad 'Nam vet Herschell (Steve Hawkes) down the Florida turnpike, where he helps Angel, a stranded, bible quoting "seeker of the truth" in hot pants. The two go back to her place, where a hippie drug party hosted by Angel's cute, baby-voiced "far out" sister Anne is taking place. When Herschell ignores the advances of a woman, she informs him, "You' re nothing but a dumb b***ard who doesn't know where it's at, anyway!"

Herschell ends up getting a job at the father's turkey farm, Anne gets him "hooked" on pot and scientists in lab jackets trick him into eating chemicals that transform him into a turkey headed monster that gobbles, hangs people upside down, slits their throats and drinks the blood, all while dressed in flared bell-bottom pants!

One very blood, standout murder scene has a guy getting his leg cut off with a table saw. Some real turkeys are beheaded, too, for additional gore. But the action stops cold when the on-screen, chain-smoking narrator (played by director Grinter) reads preachy, pro-Christian commentary off of cue cards on a desk!

The big, muscular Hawkes sports Elvis hair, thick sideburns and weird, blotchy skin, and is one of the worst actors I can think of. Other cast members flub or forget their lines and often look directly at the camera and laugh! No one is credited with writing it on the version I have (the original VHS copy), but with lines directed toward Hawkes like, "He's strong, he's handsome and he enjoys being attractive to the opposite sex," I strongly suspect he had his hand in there somewhere.

Do NOT miss this movie!

Score: (technically speaking) 1 out of 10 / (for laughs) 10 out of 10!

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8 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Incredible twisted Christian-Drug-Gore-Turkey Monster film, 29 juin 1999
Author: J. Mike Perkins de Houston, Texas

Certainly one of the strangest and most incredible films ever produced for human consumption. Mere words can not begin to describe this twisted masterpiece. The fantastic plot involves a guy named Hershel (Steve Hawkes) who rides a chopper and looks a bit like Elvis Presley. He meets up with two sisters, one an extremely straight Bible preaching evangelist named Angel who wants to save the world, the other a drug using slut, named Ann, who has the hots for Hershel. Hershel smokes some kind of super addicting pot which causes him to sc**w Ann. He then goes to work for a man who appears to be their father who owns a poultry farm with a built in laboratory run by some dim witted scientists. Hershel then eats a whole turkey provided by the lab which is laced with experimental drugs. He passes out, wakes up as turkey monster, starts killing a strange assortment of people, and drinks their blood. He also has sex with Ann in his turkey outfit while she voices her concerns about having turkey monster children. All throughout the film, a sleazy narrator interrupts things to give the audience confusing philosophical insights about God. It all works out in the end as Hershel finds sobriety, God, love, and poultry. You could spend your whole life trying to find something as bizarre as this film and not succeed.

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10 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
"All we did was do..give this guy some turkey", 25 juillet 2002

Author: Cobra-10 de MD

There are very few horror films that could make me laugh as much as "Blood Freak". The cinematography, script, and especially the ACTING in "Blood Freak" are so mind-blowingly awful that I still laugh at it even after seeing it 50 times. My favorite actors are the guy that owns the turkey farm and his two scientists. Their complete lack of emotion and their stumbling over their own lines (among other things) make me suspect that this movie only filmed ONE TAKE of each scene, regardless of mistakes.

I simply LOVE "Blood Freak" and never get tired of it. I even dig the '70s styling and funky soundtrack. There really aren't any other films like this out there.

I highly recommend "Blood Freak" to fans of unintentional hilarity. It is hard to find this film, but it's worth searching for it.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Thank you, Brad Grinter, for letting us laugh at love again, 10 janvier 2002
Author: eminges de mission, ks

After hearing about Blood Freak for years, after preparing myself by collecting over two hundred of the worst movies ever made, after nearly resigning myself to paying a fortune for a copy, I found Blood Freak sitting on a shelf with a cute little green price tag, biding its time, waiting to pounce.

I wasn't ready for this. Read all the other comments and realize that they're not exaggerating in the least. WORST movie ever made? No, that's still got to be Night of Horror. Blood Freak calls for a category not yet invented - the sheer glorious dancing-with-the-angels whack flakiness of Godmonster of Indian Flats or Troll 2, combined with the absolute ineptitude of Night of Horror, Weird World of LSD, or Broadway Jungle. And then add something more, an X factor, the ability to send you off the couch and onto the Karistan wheezing like a busted calliope, like the head of Hitler mugging it up in the back seat in They Saved Hitler's Brain, or the immortal. "The natives call it - Tabanga!" in from Hell It Came.

Yes, it's about mutant turkeys, good Bible preaching, a hair farm named Herschell, and balding cracker dopers, but Blood Freak goes so much further. It has the rare quality of twisting away from you and running off in a different direction, whenever you think you've got it pegged. At half a dozen points in the movie you'll have yourself totally convinced that this is a send-up, that the crazed lounge-lizards-for-Jesus narrator is smirking and winking at you. Then a throat gets slashed, a leg gets sawn off, and you realize that, no, the mutant turkeys that created this farrago are SERIOUS.

I'll give a free kitten to the first person who comes up with the present location of the papier-mache turkey head.

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6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Turkey n. (pl.-eys) large bird reared for its flesh; this as food, 30 août 2001
Author: gavcrimson de United Kingdom

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

SPOILERS INCLUDED What were they thinking; more specifically how does a pro-christian, anti drug film double as a bloody horror movie about a vampire turkey monster? The stories you've been told about the infamous ‘BloodFreak' near unbelievable as they sound do not lie. The true story behind the film a bleak tale of a horrific burns accident, a Tarzan impersonator, an aging nudist enthusiast and much bad blood is equally fascinating. BloodFreak was the brainchild of an odd couple on the fringes of the Florida entertainment scene. Brad Grinter (aka Frank Grinter aka Brett Jason Merriman) was a bit part actor in Florida area exploitation films but his main income was as a film teacher. Grinter channelled the money from pricy tuition fees into financing the budgets of his own films, the poverty row biker movie Devil Rider (1970) and more famously Flesh Feast (1970)- that climaxes with Veronica Lake melting Adolf Hitler's face off with cannibalistic maggots. The other man behind BloodFreak was Steve Hawkes, Hawkes main calling in life was to play Tarzan, a feat he accomplished but only in movies shot in far flung places to avoid copyright problems (nervous distributors would often re-christen Hawkes' Tarzan ‘Zen of the Jungle' in case of any repercussions.) Hawkes saw himself as a family entertainer, fate had other ideas and on the set of Tarzan and the Brown Prince- Hawkes was to suffer a horrific on-set accident that left him with 90% burns. Grudgingly he agreed to appear in a horror quickie as a way of paying pricey bills- hence BloodFreak was born. Hawkes stars as Herschell a christian, vietnam veteran biker thundering around Florida on his chopper. Herschell picks up ‘pretty girl with a problem' Angel who takes him back to her place. ‘Some of my sister's friends are pretty far out' remarks bible quoting Angel on the hippie drug taking presided over by her wild child sibling. Said troubled floozy sister Ann wants a piece of ‘husky man' Herschell before her sister can convert him into a bible salesman, and shock! horror! turns him onto her wild lifestyle to do so. One drag of something ‘guaranteed to make you fly' later and Herschell turns into a laughing pot head. He tries to get back on track by getting a job at a turkey farm, but his employees are mad scientists who offer him marijuana and use him as a guinea pig for ‘experiments'. Eating a whole contaminated turkey, Herschell ends up a shaking mess and from the neck up transforms into a monster turkey man! With an oversized paper mache turkey head, complete with giant beak, ping pong ball eyes and misdirected feathers Herschell the Blood Freak is a sight you wouldn't want to meet even when stone cold sober (`all we did was give this guy some turkey').

Herschell seeks solace with Ann, whose reaction ‘gosh Herschell you sure are ugly' meets with gobbles of disapproval (Herschell can only communicate by making turkey noises). Ann tells the turkey she still loves him despite the obvious problems ‘what would the children think of their father looking like that….my god what would the children look like?' Discovering he can only live off the blood of drug addicts the BloodFreak stalks Ann's dopy friends- dragging them into the bushes and drinking their blood. Disrupting an old man shooting up a teenage girl in the back of his car, the Bloodfreak kidnaps the girl, hangs her upside down and slashes her throat. Then as an afterthought strangles a passing old timer. Meanwhile a drug pusher attempts to rape Ann, but only gets as far as gawping at her knickers before the turkeyman shows up and severs the luckless creep's leg with a bandsaw. In the ‘uplifting' finale, the Bloodfreak enlists the help of goody two shoes Angel and prays to god to cure him of this literal case of cold turkey. BloodFreak is utterly mind-boggling, theres nothing quite like it. Although it may sound like a parody of campy anti-drug features like Reefer Madness, everything is played as dead serious as Angel's blank faced moralising. Within the confines of a fire & brimstone sermon, Grinter and Hawkes deceptively serve up a bang-up exploitation film. A real turkey is decapitated on camera, female bottoms are bared and an amputee plays the bandsaw victim- wobbling around on a wooden leg till the Bloodfreak ‘relieves' him off it. Based in Florida it's hard to imagine Grinter wasn't aware of the splatter movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis (he even acted in one of Lewis' nudie pictures). Thus Blood Freak's phoney yet nauseating gore draws obvious comparisons with Blood Feast (a title Grinter would snatch both parts of for Blood-Freak and Flesh-Feast). After BloodFreak Grinter made a couple of nudist propaganda films (Barely Proper 1975, Never the Twain 1974) before they and him disappeared off the face of the planet. Steve Hawkes was last heard of running an animal preserve in Florida. For Hawkes his sole brush with exploitation cinema remains a touchy subject, apparently the man who put up the money for BloodFreak ran out on him, leaving Hawkes to finish and distribute the picture himself. Little seen on its 1972 release (it was one of the first films rated X by the MPAA for violence) BloodFreak like that other slice of sunshine state lunacy ‘Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things' only really came to people's attention during the video-era. Now from New Zealand to France jaws drop at a film constantly out of focus, actors who flub there lines, dialogue like ‘how is it possible that a girl like you, young and beautiful, can be so far out' and the idea that you can put the world to rights by putting a turkeyhead on your leading man and have him run around rustic Florida. Cross paths with BloodFreak and you'll never look at a turkey in the same light again.

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Crackpot cinema at it's best!, 1 septembre 2003

Author: headtrauma420 de austin, tx

I love this movie! It is so bad that it's great! To enjoy this movie you have to have a place in your heart for crackpot cinema (low-budget movies that are so bad that they're good). It's completely unrealistic and so poorly shot that you will laugh until you cry. This movie's just plain fun.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
a turkey dude...far out!, 17 juin 2003
Author: teptime de fabulous Las Vega$!

Studly sideburned Herschell takes a job at a turkey farm...where a couple of bumbling labcoats turn him into a drugged-out, beaked, gobbling turkeymonster. Only his head is affected, however, so his stone-fox hippie girlfriend is confident that he will somehow get back to normal. Unfortunately, this affliction has the side-effect of making Herchell hang people from their feet and drink blood from their sliced necks...bummer.

All this horrible misfortune... will God save the day for poor Herschell? See this classic and find out...it's better than "Citizen Kane".....honest...

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Technically speaking, BLOOD FREAK makes sense, 19 février 2003

Author: Bryce David (brycedavidzon@excite.com)

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Spoilers

Okay, I have two things to say about BLOOD FREAK. First, about my disappointment with the twist ending. And second, a warning to those who don't like real on-screen violence inflicted on animals.

Okay, first: I bought the BLOOD FREAK DVD mainly because I love SOMETHING WEIRD DVDs, which are full of extras, and also because I love really bad movies. BLOOD FREAK is woeful. There's no doubt about that. But, and this is only a technicality and I'm not trying to be pedantic here, the story actually makes sense. The thing that everyone has failed to mention is the "twist" ending: that the whole idea of the guy (played by beefy Elvis-look-a-like Steve Hawkes) turning into a monster with a head of a turkey and feeding on addicts' blood is nothing but a DREAM or a HALLUCINATION. The character never really turns into a monster. After the guy takes the drug from the turkey farm, the man has this really bad trip and dreams he's turned into the turkey monster. At the end, he wakes up and realizes that everything was only a nightmare. I was sorta disappointed by this twist ending. BLOOD FREAK is still bad but it's not as bad as if the character had actually changed into that turkey monster. The hallucination twist is a cop-out of sorts, which robs the movie from being the next PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

With that off of my chest, BLOOD FREAK is still inept in every respect. The acting, the cinematography, the dialogue. Everything is strictly amateurish. And the chain-smoking narrator, who is often seen coughing, is probably the stupidest and most hilarious thing ever put on screen. I mean, at least Criswell didn't look sick in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. Some moments are truly weird, like when Steve Hawkes's girlfriend sees him for the first time as the turkey monster and starts talking about how the people will perceive them as a couple or how their children will turn out is, for a split second, unbelievably brilliant in its total ineptitude. There's a fair amount of violence in BF, including a scene where a man gets one of his legs chopped off. It's obvious the actor has an amputated leg in reality and they simply hired him just so the scene when the turkey monster cuts off his foot looks very convincing.

And speaking of violence, here's my second point: I also have to warn people who don't like to see animals killed on screen. At the very end of the dream, a real turkey is killed senselessly. Personally, I would have easily avoided this scene if I had known about it in advance. It's totally gratuitous and tasteless, but then this is to be expected in low budget exploitation films, even Christian exploitation films. LOL!

In the end, BLOOD FREAK is a must see for all aficionados of bad films. But I have to admit that I was disappointed by the two aspects that I mentioned above.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Incredible, simply incredible..., 30 août 2000

Author: Aleck Bennett (Aleck-3) de Washington D.C.

Man, oh man. What can one say about this film? There's no denying that it's a *bad* film. Of that we can be sure. But try to pigeonhole it into any other category, and you'll end up with a headache the size of Lake Michigan. What can one say about a movie in which a beefy Vietnam vet (resembling a late-60's Conway Twitty) follows a nice Christian young lady home, only to fall for her sister, get hooked on some bizarre strain of pot, eat an entire "experimental" turkey cooked up by some mad poultry scientists (who themselves are hooked on the wacky weed), turn into the ugly cousin of the San Diego Chicken, and become driven to feed on the blood of addicts? Where else can you see a tender love scene between a young woman and a turkey monster? Where else can you see a man in a bad turkey mask cut the prosthetic leg off of a drug dealer? Where else can you see the most insane bad-movie dream sequence this side of "Glen Or Glenda?" Where else can you see an entire cast made up of what appears to be either Foghat or their roadies? What other film features an almost-constant barrage of turkey gobbles that sound more like pencil erasers on glass? Where else can you see the director chain-smoke on camera, preach against defiling the body with chemicals, and have a coughing fit? Stop reading this review *right now* and track this baby down! I laughed until I wept. It's a beautiful thing.

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