Love Turkeys? ‘Blood Freak’ Is the Perfect Thanksgiving Revenge Movie

As we all know (and probably try to ignore as much as possible), this is an extremely bad time of year to be a turkey. As such, you might be wondering this Thanksgiving how best to distract the very sad herbivores in your life. Fortunately, we have a suggestion! It’s called Blood Freak: a preposterous (and occasionally gory) slasher flick from 1972. Better yet: the character at the center of the movie has the head of a turkey and a thirst for human blood. (A turkey? Turning the tables on us? Doesn’t that sound like fun? Anyone? No?)

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our story begins with our leading man/future turkey (his name is Herschell) riding his motorcycle on a freeway. He pulls over to help a beautiful young woman named Angel who has a flat tire, and the two hit it off. Herschell has recently returned from Vietnam and is trying his darnedest to look like Vegas-era Elvis, which I genuinely didn’t know was a thing that anyone did unless they were kind of joking.

Naturally, this being the 1970s, Herschell and Angel immediately go to a drug-fueled party at Angel’s sister Ann’s house. For some reason, hanging out in this den of iniquity is the elderly owner of a turkey farm. (Don’t ask questions!) And for some reason, he immediately offers Herschell a job. (Seems totally fine!)

Angel won’t stop talking about the Bible and is less fun than she looks, so Herschell does sex with Ann instead and smokes mysterious drugs that Ann provides. Hours later, Herschell finds himself sweating and writhing around in pain on Ann’s leopard-print waterbed. (You heard me…) Ann gives him more unspecified drugs to smoke, which immediately makes him feel better. Herschell then angrily declares that he is “hooked,” which is kind of amazing if you know anything at all about how drugs work.

In the morning, Herschell heads to the poultry farm, where his job involves eating turkey that has been chemically altered for government-related testing reasons. A variety of men wearing white lab coats are as vague as possible about the reasons for this, lest this movie make any salient points about anything whatsoever.

After Herschell eats the chemically enhanced turkey, he immediately passes out in the grass and starts having seizures. When Herschell wakes up hours later, he has turned into a turkey himself — but only from the neck up because special effects are expensive. (See also: the grand finale of 1958’s The Fly.) Herschell stumbles back to Ann’s (on foot, which kind of sucks because I really wanted to see a turkey riding a motorcycle today).

Because his mouth only makes “gobble-gobble” noises now, Herschell passes Ann handwritten notes explaining that he’s turned into a turkey mutant. Which is fairly obvious because he looks like this now:

Ann takes all of this pretty well and calmly makes a (frankly brilliant) speech about whether or not their kids are going to look like turkeys now. (Aside from another scene in which an attempted rapist has his leg sawn off, this is my favorite moment in the entire movie. Turkey-headed children, for the win!)

Off the cuff entirely, Herschell decides to go on a killing spree, specifically targeting drug users and then drinking their blood. (One of them is a lady he called “a tramp” at the drug party, so she obviously deserves this.) When Herschell murders ladies, the same (short) scream track plays on a loop over and over again in the background and we’re not supposed to notice. Which is actually a lot more fun than it sounds.

Herschell does not have an efficient system for gathering and drinking his victims’ blood, so just cups his hands into the stream and does a slurping thing with his giant beak. GET YOURSELF A BUCKET, TURKEY-HERSCHELL. YOU’RE WASTING SO MUCH DRUG-BLOOD.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it involves finding sobriety, God and a nice pier to stand on. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that this entire movie is sporadically interrupted by a guy in a shiny shirt, smoking a cigarette from behind a desk and trying desperately to provide sensible, Twilight Zone-esque commentary. (This is not very successful. In part because this gentleman is reading his lines off a piece of paper. Also in part because he resembles what would happen if Christopher Lee and Ron Jeremy combined forces to become one human.)

Shiny shirt guy’s real name is Brad F. Grinter and he co-wrote and co-directed Blood Freak with Steve Hawkes. And guess who played Herschell? Steve Hawkes, that’s who! Which means Hawkes and Grinter actually did all of this to themselves, on purpose, entirely willingly. And for that? We should all be grateful.

‘Blood Freak’ is streaming for free on Plex right now.