We all get a kick out of those zany '50s "educational films" that our parents and grandparents were subjected to in classrooms around the country in their school daze. Watching them now is never a let down if you're looking for a barrel of unintentional laughs, hence why so many of them have been displayed on the Comedy Central™ episodes of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and why you can actually find them for sale on DVD collections. Of course, hindsight's always 20/20, so it's not fair to point out the sheer stupidity of these short subject films just because we've got updated technology and education. Back then, they didn't know that taking a girl wasn't something you could be taught, as educational film dates always involved school events, no physical contact, no motion of the hips and no potentially innuendo-type situations like hand movements or food consumption. It's not their fault they didn't realize that "duck and cover" wasn't a sufficient tactic for avoiding a nuclear blast in your backyard. They never knew you could contract fatal, incurable diseases just by giving an African monkey a hummer. It was a golden time of blissful ignorance back then and just because we don't have it so obliviously as they did doesn't mean we should take the insecure way out and displace our hatred for our own lives by looking back on theirs and laughing... wait... what?

Okay Anubis, you're starting to confuse yourself and when you confuse yourself you confuse your audience, so it's time to lay off the lecture and get to the movie... oh man, do I really have to though?! I mean, I really don't wanna think about Blood Freak anymore! Isn't it enough that I sat through it to watch it in the first place, let alone should I have to review it too? Couldn't I just babble on incoherently about things I actually enjoy, like television, video games, cheese cake and Luc Besson movies? No? Argh, fine, fuck you you little weasel, see if you make it onto my Cthulhumas card list this year... Anyway, the point of going into short and seemingly pointless diatribes about old skool movie gore and corny educational films is to properly prepare you for the transition into Blood Freak: a feature length scare film that tells kids to say "NO!" to the sinister seductress known as Mary Jane, screaming at her with all the might your little lungs will allow you until she runs away in tears and knows to never bother you again... until she sees you with another narcotic and starts to follow you everywhere and leave psychotic messages on your answering machine 1000 times a day. What narcotic should you choose over Miss Jane? Jesus.

Yes, the twisted deviant perverts behind Blood Freak want us all to see marijuana for what it really is in an effort to convince us that Jesus Christ is our one true savior and only by living our lives under the harsh burdening laws of Christianity can we live fulfilling lives... all the more reason why there should be a law calling for a 5 day waiting period before selling any kind of recording equipment to someone of the blood drinking cannibalistic cult known as Christianity. And no, wine and bread do not count as blood and flesh, so stop being such fucking poseurs and either start consuming the real thing or shut your holy word holes! Anyway, what exactly IS the unholy truth of pot that the psycho Christian moviemakers want to reveal to us? It's simple. Dope will not only turn you into a violent, crazed "addict" who will stop at nothing until you've consumed enough of the sweet leaf to kill you and damn you to an eternity in the fiery Inferno, but it's also a mutagen that, when combined with other such worldly sins as premarital sex and baked turkey, will transform you into a turkey man whose only aim in life is consuming the blood of junkies... and we're supposed to believe the people behind this are AGAINST drug consumption!? Please! This is something only somebody ON something would've come up with! Shit, I'd hazard a guess and say they were on SEVERAL somethings when they gave birth to this psychotropic Jesus freak abomination!

But, all Christian hypocrisies aside, I've gotta get going on this review before my roommate smothers himself on his 8ft. bong, so let's get truckin'. This is one for the pilgrims out there, whose once perfect holiday dedicated to brotherhood and gluttony has been made a ruined mockery. The tale begins with our narrator (yes, we've even got a narrator!), a ciggy sucking, fruit of a man, with his Grecian moustache and thinning hair, decked out in a silky swingers shirt and gold chain. If this guy's never done porn or wished to do so, I'd be shocked. Smoothy McSuave here starts trying to fuck with us, going on about the meaning of the word "change" and it's constant effect on our lives, before breaking into the story of Hershel, or rather our movie of Hershel. Who's Hershel? Why, Hersh is the chopper cruisin', pastel jacket wearing, 30-something-trying-to-pass-himself-off-as-a-20-something, Jesus lovin', 'Nam vet hero of this story my friends! And Hersh is about to land into the moral "rock and a hard place" that all youngsters (or middle-agers trying to pass themselves off as youngsters) eventually have to face: drugs or Jesus.

Cruisin' his chopper to his friend Angel's place, Hersh finds himself in the middle of a party, or rather a gathering Satan's hippy army, where Angel's sister Anne notices the masculine "young" hero and instantly starts causing trouble because he's interested in Angel and her chaste ways, not Anne and her sinister killer-of-youth narcotics. If Hersh and Angel are groovin' on the church scene and gettin' all high on God and shit, then why are they hanging around with users and pushers? Are they trying to convert them, or is there just nowhere else they can explore the magic and wonder of the scriptures?! Unhappy with Hersh's bible-thumping ways, the stone groovin' hipsters in Beezlebub's service plot against the innocent Hershel, ready to have the goody-goody shake hands with their pal Chronic. But, before we got on with the corruption of the Christian faith, let's check back in with our swingin' narrator, Smoothy McSuave, who has more incoherent philosophizing to do about change in our lives, change in our world, and changing our undergarments regularly so as to prevent infections.

Back to the poisoning of our badly dressed lummox, Anne (who may or may not be evil according to Smoothy) uses Hershel's natural weakness (i.e. his dick) against him to lure him into her world of premarital tan line sex and the unholy dope. His only regret the following morning? Anne didn't set her alarm, making Hershel ALMOST late for his job interview at the local turkey farm! Wait a minute, Hershel's been wearing the same set of clothes for 3 days straight now, isn't that bordering on some kind of sin? Is Hershel pushing his ticket into the pearly gates all thanx to a lack of wardrobe?! Eh, who gives two shits. As if doing odd jobs on a turkey farm wasn't weird enough, Hershel has to work at a turkey farm with a laboratory, where two guys you really wouldn't want touching your edibles in the first place, engage in radical chemical experimentation on their "walking birds"... them sideburns they're sportin' are a dead giveaway somethin' ain't kosher...

For a little extra side money and some more pot, Hersh is offered the opportunity to consume some of this altered meat before it's put on the market, helping further government food preservative research by leaps and bounds... human guinea pigs are always the best kind. Speaking of Hersh, for being such a staunch Christian man, he seems to take a little much pleasure in bitch-slapping the produce and molesting their waddles... As with any drug scare flick from the era, Hersh becomes inexplicably addicted to dope, going into mild psychotic fits if he don't get his Mary Jane fix, even it's coming from the jock of some guy named Guy... and it's not even lit yet... After stuffing an entire chemically treated, baked bird down his turkey hole on the job site, Hersh lapses into a series of comical seizures. Not wanting to be held accountable for the new guy's potentially fatal turkey consumption, the sideburned turkey meddlers drag the hero elsewhere where his spastically twitching carcass can't be discovered and they can avoid police interference with their turkey juicing cartel.

While embroiled in his ham-assed seizures, Hersh shows us a side of the Christian scare movie genre oft overlooked: you are what you eat, and in this case, Hershel is drug addled poultry... I shit you not, our hero's head is transformed into that of, yes, a big turkey and he gains an insatiable appetite for illegal substances. He's no longer just a jive turkey, but a real (well as real as you can get for a $30 budget) turkey man. With nowhere else to go, the amalgamation of lumpy man and flightless bird seeks out Anne for help and understanding, instead getting a drawn out, pointless, mind-numbing monologue, including Anne's ponderings of what their wedding and children would turn out like... gotta love the women who are so desperate NOT to be alone in life that they'll even marry a freak of man with an animal head on their shoulders... wait a minute, jackal head, crazy freak, God o' Death... I think my fiance and I need to have a long talk...

Despite the usually terrifying talk of matrimony, I guess Turkey-Hersh is just happy to get laid, so he kills the lights and climbs on top of his corrupting ladyfriend to engage in yet another sin: beastiality! Damn, mutations, premarital sex, beastiality, I guess pot really IS as evil and heathenistic as the '30s and '40s told us! In which case, my life should be much cooler than it currently is... Either way it's back to another installment of Smoothy "The Operator" McSuave's "Retarded Philosophical Ramblings For The Unabashed Swinger". In this episode, Mr. McSuave shows us why he's just so damn smooth, as he TALKS OVER THE NEXT SCENE'S DIALOGUE! Yes, I have no idea what the fuck happens in the movie because Smoothy decides it's his time to talk and no dialogue is going to stand in his way! I think Angel came over to offer Hershel the ultimate cure-all in God, but like I said, the amateur porn star douche bag decided to ruin it with more of his existential bullshit... not that the scene wouldn't have ruined itself on it's own.

His friends, or rather Anne's friends, aren't so kool on Hersh's new look, and I'm guessing they shun the goon, but since the scene suddenly cuts off to Hersh running from the house, the rest of what happened will have to be left to our imaginations. Where does the man monster run to? He's out looking to score some drugs, but he's not in the market for something to smoke or chew or shoot up, he's looking for a more immediate high. And what's the most immediate way to get something into your blood stream other than dissolving it through your digestive track? Well, actually, shooting up directly into your blood would work, but Hersh decides that it's a better idea to consume someone else's blood in which drugs have already been infused... ok, fuck the logic in the brain pan, the point is that Turkey-Hersh goes on the prowl for some addicts' tainted plasma and finds it in random heroin junkies that really aren't so hard to find, just listen for that damn generic "okay, there's some bad stuff comin' up" music, it makes it a lot easier to locate victims...

Speaking of victims, as for Hershel's, he likes to capture the unsuspecting and often "out of it" junkies (who seem to have weathered their heroin addictions without the typical "sick" look of your average junky, instead displaying a healthy glow) and hang them upside down, so as to send the blood to their heads, where he liberates it via a jugular gouging with an ice pick so he can slurp it up and get his fix. Granted these spoutings of bright red fluid from throats seem cool in their own way, except for a couple of problems: (1) the scream track for the victims is the same, badly done track whether for man or woman (2) the director's inability to show such a sequence without a BLATANT CLOSE-UP of the small plastic tube the FX used to project the almost pink colored paint they're passing off as blood... oh wait, that's probably a side effect of the heroin... sure, and I'm the other white meat... For even more fun when watching Blood Freak kids, keep any eye out and count how many times these supposedly "dead" bodies' chests continue to rise and fall despite the ceasing of respiratory functions.

During one of his feeding sessions, Hersh is attacked by a fat guy passing by, who goes into random psychotic vigilante mode, jumping the waddle chinned scourge of the local drug culture and stabbing him thusly in the face with his own ice pick. Turkey Hersh, obviously displeased with the irony of being attacked with his own weapon, promptly yanks it out and proceeds to plant it in the lard shaking, would-be-hero's many fleshy rolls. Elsewhere, Guy the, uhm, guy responsible for Hershel's budding/immediate addiction in the first place, argues money matters with his supplier, whom the camera seems to have an inability to focus on at times (perhaps he's that period's God's Hand Killer?... what, never saw Frailty?) and who tends to pronounce his lines as if saying each word on their own. For instance, whereas a normal person might casually say, "I'm not gonna deal with this", this guy would say, "I am not going to deal with this", like a robot or Al Gore. Details aside, the dispute ends when Guy offers the near-comatose Anne up to the supplier's perverted whims as payment.

Hershel's not too happy about finding his woman being raped by a goofy talking dirtbag, so he and his big paper-machet head leap into action, scaring the goon away. The Gobbledy-Gooker's evil cousin then proceeds to stalk the bastard to a machine shop, where he promptly knocks him unconscious and saws off his right foot with a table saw, killing the man almost instantly. Though that "killing him almost instantly part" is just another thorn-in-the-side this movie's planted me with, I do have to commend the director for his ability to use an angle that makes the injury look almost real! From here it's the end for Turkey-Hershel though, as he gets decapitated by Anne's friends and his head plays stand in for the Thanksgiving centerpiece at this year's dinner. As if that wasn't savage enough of them, you should see how these fucking greedy, savage, turkey munching slobs rip their turkey apart! That poor thing no doubt took hours to roast, but mere seconds to ravage into nothing but bones and scraps of dark meat! The truest, most vulgar and disturbing scene of the movie...

Of course this is the point where Hershel wakes up, proving that the entire fiasco was nothing more than a dream and that government turkey preservatives aren't mutagens, simply powerful hallucinogens... crazy hippies. Once out of his drug-addled, turkey-fed stupor, Hersh is discovered by his boss and submitted to a drug rehab center for treatment of his marijuana addiction... for smoking pot this guy gets rehab... Christ stuffed with bread crumbs! For weed?! I love how people who have never experienced marijuana feel they're instantly qualified to label it as a harmful, addictive, life changing substance that will send you to Hell... then again, it is a plant placed on this earth by "God", so does this mean that the sheep are questioning the all knowingness of their lord and master? Nah. I'm sure they're already writing in passages into their "Christian Instructional Manual To Living" to make it an 11th commandment or something. Oh well, as for our movie/Christian brainwashing session, Hersh successfully completes his "rehab" and forgives Anne for her misdoings, allowing the couple to live happily ever after under the love of the father, the son and the holy ghost of Christmas past. It's all wrapped up of course with more moral mumbo-jumbo from Smoothy, who can't even handle his own cancer sticks...

As with any drug scare flick, Blood Freak's acting is deplorable, the soundtrack unbearably generic, the special FX as amateur as you can get and the set pieces authentically cheesy as real home decor at the time. It's simple as that. You can't help but wonder if it might have turned out better, had they not done the entire thing on a "first shot only" basis. However, with all the film they saved by not re-shooting anything, it could be put to other pieces of ass, included on the DVD's extras section... In closing, if Blood Freak isn't enough to convince you that Christians should be banned from any type of media productions, check out the Christian superhero money machine Bibleman and I think you'll be pleasantly terrified. As for me, I've got some decidedly unholy things to be exacting on the assholes in the DVD.com customer service department, so this is me, finishing.