Blood Freak (1972)

An absolute waste of money

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Canadian body builder Steve Hawkes plays Vietnam vet named Herschell who smokes a lot of weed and turns into vampiric were-turkey after eating a scientifically-altered turkey prepared by two scientists in their laboratory.He quickly begins to stalk and kill young female junkies and drink their blood."Blood Freak" by Brad F.Grinter and Steve Hawkes has to be seen to be believed.There is even uplifting pro-Christian message at the end.The film is gleefully bizarre and has some amateurish gore scenes including table saw leg cutting.The acting is hilariously bad,the editing is awful and Grinter's speeches are utterly stupid.6 cold turkeys out of 10."How can such a big hunk of man be such a damn coward?"

Fresh out of the psychedelic 1960s, "Blood Freak" tries to be many things, but it doesn't know how to do any of them right. It's an ignorant person's attempt at a horror movie, made by someone who doesn't understand the genre, but pretends to be a master of it. To understand Blood Freak is to understand that sometimes, coherence can be fatal.Our protagonist is a stud. Herschell is real American man, in that he's an unemployed drifter who's after the women and after the drugs. And mind you, these are some fine women, and some finer drugs. Drugs so potent, they have a strange effect on Herschell. What do they do? They send him on a bizarre drug trip, which has an even stranger side effect when coupled with the experiments he undergoes as a guinea pig to some inept turkey farmer scientists. What does this mean? Well, all he has to do is taste test the experimented turkeys, but things not-so-quickly become complicated.This movie begins with titles straight out of a Roger Corman picture. Then the movie throws religious themes at you, as well as the occasional interludes of a chain-smoker who thinks he's Vincent Price. The premise is never sure of itself, struggling throughout its runtime to understand itself, but never truly does. It's nudity is softcore to none, it's gore is confusing and contrived, and it's outcome is propaganda, preaching against everything this film fails to accurately misrepresent.The technical quality of this piece is inferior, which compliments the narrative nicely. Had the film been well made, it would just be bad. But it's those inconsistencies throughout that make it feel more like the trip it didn't intend to be, but ultimately was destined to be. The out of focus shots? The unnecessary zooming? The poor lighting? The awkward sound design? The brief and badly timed editing? These "flaws" are essential to the experience that is Blood Freak.

Blood Freak is set in Miami in Florida where biker Herschell (co-writer & co-director Steve Hawkes who is so good he has TWO on screen credits during the opening sequence!) rides into town, he notices a pretty young lady named Angel (Heather Huges) having car trouble by the side of the road so stops to give her a hand. Herschell isn't much of a mechanic & ends up giving Angel a lift to her sister Ann's (Dana Cullivan) place where she is having a pot fuelled party, Angel is your typical bible basher & frowns upon drugs but before he knows it Herschell is addicted to dope. To earn a bit of cash Herschell takes a job at a Turkey farm where they think nothing of testing chemical laden Turkey meat on human Guinea Pigs, just like Herschell in fact. Not being able to resist some extra dope money Herschell eats the experiential Turkey meat & soon turns into a half human half Turkey creature whose thirst can only be satisfied by human blood!Written, produced & directed by Steve Hawkes who stars in the thing & Brad F. Grinter who appears as the chain smoking narrator who pops up at seemingly random moments with titbit's of advice, Blood Freak is a quite astonishing film on many levels & is surely one of the incompetent & bizarre films ever commercially released. Where do I even start to describe & review this totally bonkers film? Blood Freak is maybe best summed up as an anti-drug, anti-science religious killer Turkey monster film & the best one ever made at that although at the last count it's the only anti-drug, anti-science religious killer Turkey film ever made. There's some truly hilarious dialogue here, the scene in which Ann sees Herschell as the Turkey monster for the first time & says 'Gosh Herschell, you sure are ugly' just demonstrates a lack of compassion & then Ann goes on to discuss whether their children would look like him! The whole film is quite lifeless & dull, it plods along & even at 80 minutes it drags, it takes what seems like ages for the Turkey monster to show & there's a really bad cop-out ending that just reinforces that drugs are bad, very bad. There's one memorable moment in which a drug dealing rapist has his leg cut off with an electric band saw but otherwise Blood Freak is quite lethargic but it's just so unintentionally funny with hilarious dialogue, bad acting to make you cringe, awful production values & one of the worst monster masks in film history. For me Blood Freak is a so bad it's entertaining sort of film although I suspect most others will just think it's total amateurish crap which to be fair it is (but it's lovable amateurish crap...).Blood Freak looks like it was shot by people who have no idea how to shoot a film, there's not a steadicam in sight so the camera jerks around like it's in the middle of a gale force wind at times, the cinematography is awful & some of the night scenes are so dark you cannot see whats going on & the sound is poor to with muffled dialogue & silly sound effects. The special effects are poor although the leg cutting scenes look alright since a real amputee was used for it, the Turkey monster mask looks ridiculous. There's a small bit of animal cruelty as a Turkey has it's head cut off & it's twitching headless body is seen. You can often hear the director shout action or other instruction, shots last to long & the actor's look lost too many times & the whole production is quite like no other film I can ever remember seeing.Shot in Miami in Florida the whole is incompetent & only has it's unintentionally hilarious dialogue, plot, special effects, music & camera work to keep you watching. Apparently the original financiers backed out during production (maybe they saw the dailies) & directors Hawkes & Grinter had to finance the rest of the film themselves, it wasn't money well spent. The acting is terrible, the screams are awful & really irritating & the same one is used over & over again on a loop, couldn't they get someone else to scream slightly differently?Blood Freak is an amazingly bad film, it's awful in every regard yet it's just so funny, so short & so bad that I thought it was quite entertaining although please, please don't take that as any sort of strong recommendation as this really is awful from start to finish & anyone with any true cinematic taste will not believe their eyes.

I have a great sense of "camp" - I thoroughly enjoy films like "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," "Queen of Outer Space," all Paul Morrissey & John Waters films, etc. So when I saw the listing for "Blood Freak" on TCM's schedule ("Derelict biker goes on drug trip and transforms into killer turkey") I thought - what a hoot this is gonna be! Yet I kept waiting for the payoff, and instead just wasted 86 mins of my life I'll never get back. Does ANYONE think this picture is funny? How in the world did "Blood Freak" wind up on Turner 'CLASSIC' Movies?! Bad acting is a staple of movies of this type, but when it's THIS bad it's just distracting. (David Lochary & Monique van Vooren would deserve Oscars if compared to Steve Hawkes & Dana Cullivan.) So can anyone tell me what I was missing?