A life among the acid-trippers, needle freaks and hash-puffers of the far-out hippie scene circa ’72 is a life lived on the edge.
It’s not for everybody.
Anything can happen at any time and the most jaded among them have, no doubt, seen everything: overdoses, addictions, scrapes with the law, death, lice, dandruff, Jefferson Airplane live a decade before Grace Slick started to look like Ric Ocasek’s uncle. Yeah, I think that’s everything.
They’ve been around, done it all, smoked it all, enjoyed free love and saved money on haircuts, too. Nothing surprises them, except for maybe one thing:
A guy who turns into a killer mutant turkey after eating experimental white meat from his new job at a poultry farm. Not even Lou Reed ever wrote a song about that.
And when it rains, it pours, since this psycho turkey man specifically targets drug users because he somehow gets high off their blood. You can’t light up a joint or pull black the plunger on a syringe in this movie without getting your neck slashed. Meanwhile, our poor victims here have little to fight back with other than their bad acting. It’s not fair, but, hey, life isn’t fair. That’s only one reason why this is an essential film.
Among the other reasons is the fine, truly hallucinogenic performance by heavy-jawed lead actor/co-director/co-writer Steve Hawkes (he looks exactly like a guy with a beefcake name like Steve Hawkes should look), especially during the scenes where he’s having a turkey-transforming seizure in the grass while the camera hangs back and hangs out like it’s merely shooting establishing footage. There are also some cool drug parties, a jumbled opening credits sequence that makes you feel like you’re high right from the start and some strong lessons on how to (and how not to) shoot a movie on a budget of about $130.
In the end, it’s in the Top 1,000 strongest anti-drug statements ever filmed. The Turkey and the Damage Done.