Notes from the Turkeyground: Reflections on a Month of Bad Movies

To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of...a painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference. - Aldous Huxley

Every year I participate in two film-viewing 'challenges'. Both are managed through the online community of the IMDb horror genre message boards. One is the October Challenge, in which one has to watch 31 horror movies in 31 days, half of which must be first-time views. This October Challenge excites us all around the board and has even spread to unrelated blogs and facebook groups. The Challenge is an opportunity to marshall one's energies toward enriching one's cinematic experience, broadening horizons, deeper education in the treasures of our beloved horror genre. For the chosen few touched by some wonderful perversion, however, the October Challenge loses its lustre midway through and we see in the distance some more perillous yet infinitely more interesting mountain to climb: the Turkey Challenge. This challenge, which lasts throughout November, consists in watching as many 'bad' (rated below 5.0 on IMDb) horror movies one can for points.

The films that challenge us to see them, and through them the world, in new ways are at the highs and lows. The great films, however, give us a paten to read the code and come equipped with a guarantee, New Way of Seeing or Your Money Back. When you come to the bad films, you're on your own: it's up to your ingenuity to make them work, your mind to find the way to see them, your will to enjoy them in spite of their own protean efforts at evasion. Here are creatures that don't want to be caught, don't want to be enjoyed; and we're the Zeus to their Europa, seizing and impregnating them with value.(1) These are the turkeys and we're the perverse who find the treasures in the rough.

This year I kicked the challenge off to a wonderful start with my girlfriend and I watching some Roger Corman and Fred Olen Ray. Yes, we watched DeCoteau's Grizzly Rage, too, and it remains one of the worst of the month. But it was easily forgotten in the delirious enjoyment of Ray's Deep Space, in which the great Charles Napier fights a slimy-tentacled alien monster, and Corman's Swamp Women, which contains women and eventually a swamp, but no real swamp women. We enjoyed it so much we indulged in more Corman with the Shakespearean and brilliant The Undead and the underrated The Wasp Women. Corman's ability to entertain and have fascinating, enjoyable characters whatever the budget proved an affable start to the challenge, imparting a feeling that we were already discovering underrated treasures in what, to the ignorant public, appears to be dungheaps. Soon even DeCoteau redeemed himself with the pure '80s vomit that is Dreamaniac.

We then embarked upon a course that we would be on throughout the Turkey Challenge: the viewing of every Jerry Warren horror film. Here we were delighted. How could we be having so much luck? Even the maligned films of Jerry Warren were exciting and fun. They all had unnecessary, and unnecessarily long dance scenes, islands, looped sound effects (listen for the "Boo yeah! Boo yeah!" in Terror of the Bloodhunters), but I'll be damned if the stories weren't interesting in a zany way and the characters likable. I'll also be damned if we didn't just have the luck of picking the only original Jerry Warren films in our first three tries, kind of like winning the lottery twice. From there on, we found the hideous depths of Warren's Conquistador tendencies, pilfering the treasures of the Aztec peoples, overlaying awful narration, and inserting endless scenes of fat men receiving massages. What a guy.

Meanwhile, on my own time, I'd been educating myself in Andy Milligan. I was already familiar with, and charmed by, Milligan from previous Turkey Challenges. But this was the first time I decided to watch as much Milligan as I could. I began with a total dud, the wretched Carnage, possibly the worst film of Milligan's career. Even Surgikill, written by rejects from a Jewish fraternity and directed by Milligan for the money, is more enjoyable than Carnage, if only because it elicits some emotion (primarily embarrassment) from the audience. Still, much of Milligan is enjoyable and original. His ability to create intense drama, dwell amongst the dysfunctional, and sympathize with the deformed certainly gives his work distinction.

One of the finest ideas in the Turkey Challenge is the 'trifecta', whereby we gain extra points for watching three turkeys by the same director. Trifectas allow us to enjoy a large sampling of a frequently-unappreciated director's oeuvre and receive rewards for the dedication. My girl and I were on the lookout for new trifectas, ideas others hadn't thought of yet. So we went with Sam Newfield and Roberta Findlay. Newfield's films, all with PRC and two starring George Zucco, were mysterious, atmospheric, well-written pictures whose only flaw was having a low budget. But for 1940s horror, all a low budget really means is that the sets weren't as impressive as Universal's. I really can't say Dead Men Walk is significantly inferior to Tod Browning's Dracula, because it isn't. Nor is Newfield's The Monster Maker at all inferior to any of the highly-respected spectacle horrors from Universal, like The Hunchback of a Notre-Dame, a film whose only real merits are in the sets and Lon Chaney. IMDb ratings can be so puzzling; persistance in the Turkey Challenge will have one losing faith in them entirely. So, no surprise, we found Roberta Findlay's films to be quite good as well, all of them concerned with the same idea: a woman in a relationship begins relating to the supernatural and has to struggle against her boyfriend/husband for her autonomy in doing so. Her best film, Lurkers, slightly twists the formula in that the woman wants to avoid the supernatural, but her controlling boyfriend manipulates her into it. More wonderful discoveries! I feel we're explorers in an alien land! Why have so many observers failed to see what we see if they haven't been viewing it with the telescope of preconceptions?

We were now coming to an inevitable point in the Turkey Challenge: we were stuffed. I haven't asked my girl where she thinks it happened, but I think the last film on which we had that early thrill, that sensation of being discoverers and that we were seeing what no-one saw, or at least seeing it in a new light; the last film on which we had that elation was Witchtrap, which we watched in the second week of November and from which we learned the truly remarkable term 'neanderfuck'. The first week is always one of exhilaration. Then the abnormal becomes the normal, heaven starts looking a little like earth. We were planning to take breaks and watch a normal film now and then during the challenge, but it didn't really happen; I was too keen on beating other participants who were beginning to outstrip me. So, we were tired, but we pushed on. We continued our Kevin Tenney trifecta, started a new Corman trifecta, and even started a Freddie Francis trifecta. Sure, we encountered some good films. The Cormans were good, we enjoyed the Jeff Burr films, and William Fruet's Blue Monkey reminded us of Fred Olen Ray's Deep Space. But we'd had too much of a good thing. Our tastebuds were exhausted.

On my own time, I'd more or less given up on Milligan, puttered around with Donald Farmer films, the best of which is Scream Dream for its costumes and jokiness, but finally, despite vowing David DeCoteau, as director of Grizzly Rage, is too horrifying a prospect to return to, I plunged into the homoerotic nightmare depths of The Brotherhood. And I haven't looked back. Seven DeCoteau trifectas later, I find myself exhausted, but not regretful. I actually enjoyed the first eight or so DeCoteaus. Then it got to be too much. No, of course I never tired of the young studs in tightie-whiteys; I tired of the rigorously-pursued blandness that is DeCoteau's non-trademark.

With my girl, I still managed to enjoy a good number of the films we watched. Somehow penetrating into DeCoteau's depths left me more satisfied with non-DeCoteau turkeys and rejuvenated me a little. The Anaconda series was fun, but I clearly got more out of it than she did. The same happened with Rage of the Yeti. But we shared some DeCoteau moments at the end with Final Stab and The Frightening, and closed this year out with a bang in the form of Andy Milligan's very talky The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! together, myself with the Master, Fred Olen Ray, and she with a Wynorski double-feature.

We both found a lot to enjoy this month, though it feels like far longer than a month now that I look back. Can it be only a little over a week ago, I thought as the month ended, that we watched Anacondas: Trail of the Blood Orchid? Can it really have been but 28 days ago that we watched Swamp Women and Dreamaniac? Somehow the Turkey Challenge is outside of the ordinary laws of Time and Space. 100 movies in 30 days, countless treasures tangible and intangible; I invite everyone reading to participate next year and find yourself, as well as your relationship to movies, transformed for the better.

(1) - On the subject of viewing movies, especially bad movies, in new ways, I've already written at some length in The Question Concerning Watchability.