I Can't Believe I Watched the Whole Thing: ThanksKilling (2009)

Today was one of those rare days I have time to go to a friend's house. The problem with that is that I have pretty much no say over what I end up seeing. Of course all my friends are well aware of my habits and this blog now, so whenever I'm coming over they take the opportunity to subject me to pretty much whatever film they want. Sometimes they're good, usually they aren't. It has inspired me to make a new label called "Jed's House" which I will tag all applicable movies with. Jed's fans/stalkers will be happy about this. Today I got to see ThanksKilling, and indie horror film that might just be so bad it's good. Find out after the jump!


The story goes like this: Every 505 years an evil immortal talking turkey rises from the ground to kill all the white people it finds. It does this as revenge for what happened to the Native Americans. A group of high school friends have car problems while heading out on a camping trip, and end up in the woods where Turkey (yes, that's it's proper name) is about to be revived. It's now up to them to stop the deadly rampage of this rubber puppet evil turkey.

Somehow, Turkey often manages to wield axes, shotguns, and even drive a car once

The very first opening shot of the movie is an extreme close up of a woman's breast. This should give you some idea of the kind of movie this is. If you thought "porn" or "exploitation" you'd be wrong, these are actually the only boobs in the movie, but if you thought "bad" then you're dead on the money! That woman by the way is Wendy Lust, and is the top billed actress on IMDB as the "naked pilgrim". Right away, I was shaking my head asking myself "Why?"

Everything about this movie is just garbage. The script, the acting, the effects, the turkey, the story, the plot, the camera work, the music... EVERYTHING. The turkey is just an awful obviously rubber hand puppet that talks just how you would expect a rubber hand puppet to talk. The acting is some of the most dull, stale, waste of time performance you'll ever see. It wasn't even acted over the top, which could at least give it some ironic value, instead the actors are often just dead pan and emotionless, even after their parents are murdered right in front of them.

Turkey disguises himself as a person, while the Sheriff dresses up like a turkey... I'm not sure why this happened

The only saving grace is that this movie must have been made in the attempt to make something so bad it's actually good. They have such ludicrous scenes like the one above, or the local bimbo actually getting raped by the turkey and not realizing it, or the turkey wearing a person's face and actually successfully passing as that person! One scene has a baby rabbit being thrown at the group and landing in their campfire. The nerd of the group, who keeps having to wipe the slobber from his mouth because he's such a nerd is able to tell them that it wasn't just killed, but it's guts were pulled out. But not just with anything, these are beak wounds. But not just any beak, a turkey beak! DUN DUN DUUUUUNNNNN!! Keep in mind the thing on the fire, which is burning like crazy, isn't even recognizable as anything, let alone a rabbit.

This movie has some of the best worst lines I've ever heard in any movie I've seen. I haven't seen Troll 2 yet so I can't compare to that. I don't feel I can repeat them, because a) they're incredibly rude sometimes and b) I'd be spoiling the only decent thing this movie has to offer.

Sometimes campfire stories about killer turkeys come true!

Unfortunately, I only actually laughed genuinely at the "so bad it's good" moments about twice. They rest of the time it was just terrible in every way. The fact that they were trying so hard to make it "so bad it's good" just makes it even worse when it's just plain bad, which was nearly every single minute of the movie. Generally a film can only get to that holy challis when it's actually trying to be good, but it's just failing in the hardest way imaginable. This could be a movie that some find fun in a drunken group setting, but I just watched it with a bunch of friends and I found it mostly stupid, and a waste of time. I'll admit that one person in the group of 4 did find it quite funny though, but I'm pretty sure the other 2 were more on my side of the fence.

If you're into terrible bad movies, or just enjoy the pain of watching movies like this, like Puneet, then give it a shot. Someone out there liked it, since they told my friend we had to watch this. If I ever meet that person though, I think I might need to slap them. At least it's not too long, so it doesn't take that long to get it over with. That fact alone makes it better than Versus in my opinion.