This month's Double Feature Movies From Hell is a chock full of cheesy badness, stinking to high heaven with cinematic incompetence.
Co-editor Steve Duarte decided to give us the 2009 "Turkey"...
Thankskilling (2009)
Review written by Steven M Duarte
This month’s shit pick of the month is a film that was made with a very low budget and very low expectations. When I say low I mean very low, were talking Troma levels here. The basic premise of Thankskilling is an Indian Shaman resurrected a Turkey during the first Thanksgiving in order to kill the Pilgrims that did their people wrong. The Turkey comes back every 5 years to wreak havoc on the people in the area. Get your attention yet? Yeah I didn’t think so this one was one of the worse films I have ever seen.
The argument can be made that this film was intended to be a B-movie with its campy script and horrible acting. Well it just came off as a really bad flick not worth watching. I can give a laundry list of why this is such a bad film. The acting is nonexistent, the villain looks like it was created with about $10 and the script was just plain retarded. On a positive note the original score created for the film was decent, almost Goblin sounding.
The Turkey is candidate for the worse villain in a horror film. He actually talks like a frat boy cussing with every other line he says. His dialogue was meant to be witty but just comes off as a poor attempt to make him sound cool. At one point in the film he says “nice tits bitch,” before killing a topless pilgrim, yes it’s that bad.
Now I get that it was supposed to be funny with horror elements but this has been done so much better in the past. There are the B-movies that are so bad there good but in this case the film was so bad it was horrible. The intentional funny parts were bland and there really were no unintentional funny moments which are usually aplenty in a B-movie. Avoid this piece of shit at all costs and instead watch Plan 9 or one of the campy Troma films.
--Steven M. Duarte
The Thirsty Dead (1974)
Director: Terry Becker
Cast: Jennifer Billingsley, Judith McConnell, John Considine, Tani Guthrie, Fredricka Meyers and a whole bunch of other people I can guarantee you've never heard of since.
Oh, man, what the hell were these people thinking when they gave a green-light to this piece of shit?
In the thriving night life of mid-70s Manila someone is kidnapping girls off the street. We know that because in the first few minutes of the flick we see a young go-go dancer listening to her radio...to an English speaking DJ...in Manila...yeah.
Ok, so I let that slide because, hey, you've got to give a little in these cheapo films to get something back.
And wouldn't you know it? The dancer listening to the news about kidnappings is herself a victim of a group of silent Jawa lookalikes who're stealing young women for their sinister purposes.
Cut to: Next, we're privy to a marriage proposal from a guy who looks like the Manila equivalent of John Travolta to his chick, who looks about as worn as my grandfather's dirty socks. I mean, this woman looks like she's seen the wrong end of a pimp stick, if you know what I'm saying.
Trust me, if you saw her, you'd wonder what was she thinking? She ain't no Charlie's Angel. She should think a little harder about it before turning down such a swinging guy as Manila Travolta.
So these girls are hauled from the city via the sewer system, into the sweltering jungle, where they meet up with two more kidnapped beauties, where they're all four finally dumped by some tubby half naked natives into an out of place cave system in the middle of nowhere. Now this is all done way too slowly, and melodramatically, to the tasteful combination of ominous orchestra music and the chicks' constant whining, pained grunts and heavy breathing.
Within the caves, they meet a bunch of white people, who, let's be honest, really have no business being in the middle of a Manila cave system in the middle of nowhere. But it seems these happy shiny honkies are part of a lost civilization that lives extended lives by imbibing the blood sacrifices of young girls, I guess it's okay.
Does that sound exciting?
It's worse than it sounds; believe me.
I mean, this movie is barely worth sleeping through. It's three steps below the better made-for-tv "thrillers" of yesteryear--'yesteryear' being 1974. Seems to me like someone had quite a bit of money invested in trying to make Manila the new Hollywood of the East. So what we get for their money is a bunch of half naked, tubby guys in loincloth, a group of whiny wooden actresses, who mostly look like they might have spent a little too much time working the glory-holes on 42nd Street, back in the day.
There is nothing about this film that I can recommend. Not even the wardrobe, for Christ's sake! It's that bad! The shifts and robes are shapeless pastel jobs, so the entire cast looks like walking Easter eggs most of the time.
It's tedious viewing, filled with waaaaay too many exposition stopgaps along the way to the final action.
Oh, wait...did I say action?
Let me rephrase that.
The movie has some sequences that these morons probably considered quite exciting. If you consider (I shit you not) using a stiff ass manikin as a standing for someone falling from a ladder about ten high. The manikin bounces, of course, but the legs never move.
Or if you think someone pulling a snake off screen, so it doesn't touch the ground as it "crawls" across a young writhing, screaming woman's legs. Her screams were probably real enough when she considered that this was going to be her fifteen minutes of immortality.
And the fake spider web...well, you'll know what I mean if you're ever "brave" enough or seriously psychotic enough to sit through this torturous exercise in bad-to-worse film-making. There are no believable parts to this movie. None. I've seen it referenced as being like a lost Star Trek episode; that describes it, pretty much.
Seriously, they should have named this thing THE SCRIPTED DEAD.
The least the producers could have done was throw in some half decent gore effects, or even just some tits and ass; but apparently these rough and worn ladies were trying to stretch their thespian boundaries beyond their usual lap-dance routines. Maybe they just wanted to make it on the merit of their acting. In any case, we got the short end of the G-string here, people.
--Nickolas Cook
