For this marathon, I was not going to have to make this journey alone. I found a sucker…I mean, a fellow movie fan that had the guts to put his love of bad movies to the test. Dr. AC (aka Aaron Christensen) joined me that faithful day to for another festival of B-movies and other such wonders. Though, he must have been pretty trusting of me since we’d only met a few months earlier. Little did he know of the horrors that I was going to put him through….(cue devilish laugh here) heheheh.

Blood Freak (1972) – Yes, we did watch this film last year. And since this was AC’s first Turkey Day experience, I didn’t want to give him a full frontal assault right away. But I felt that since he had never witnessed Blood Freak before, that we’d have to make that the first film. Sort of breaking him in. Or breaking him down. Not sure which. And even I had watched it last year, watching this movie with a new viewer is almost as fun as watching the film itself for the first time. The look on their faces is always a riot. When the turkey monster first makes its appearance, and they look over at you with this “Are you fucking kidding me?” look….priceless.

Lady Terminator (1988) – For the next film, we traveled to Indonesia for a film that some say might be a slight rip-off of James Cameron’s Terminator And they would be correct. Very much so. But that’s beside the point. While there are few sequences directly lifted from that Cameron movie, there is plenty of other stuff that will have you cheering for more. Hard to describe this movie other than a woman, played by the beautiful Barbara Anne Constable (in her one and only role) becomes possessed by the South Sea Queen after a snake crawls up into her while in bed. Now in control, she sets out to kill another young woman, a descent of a man who scorned her 100 years earlier.

If the wild action, lots of guns, explosions, bad hair, and this unstoppable killing machine doesn’t get you, then the dialog alone is worth your time. After sating her passion on some un-suspecting males, by leaving them a little less than men, the police discover their remains. One cop reads “It says here all three guys died with their cocks bitten off. It could be a small animal.” Classic stuff here, folks. You won’t find dialog this classic in any film coming from Hollywood. Well…actually you probably would.

If you’ve never experienced films from some of the smaller foreign markets, like Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, you are missing out on some highly original (even though they are ripping off Hollywood) and innovative films. They are always coming up with something that will have you asking if yourself “Did I just see what I thought I saw?”

Alligator (1980) – I don’t think I would have considered this film really a “turkey”. It’s sequel, Alligator 2: The Mutation…now that’s a turkey movie, but maybe we’ll get to that another day. But back to the first one. Sure, it is a B-movie at its finest, and has all the trappings of one, like a Jaws inspired plot, except he has feet now. A girl is forced to flush her baby alligator down the toilet by her father, but it doesn’t die. Thanks to the carcasses of animals disposed in the sewers that were being tested with a growth hormone, it grows and grows. And grows. So when you think about a giant alligator living in the sewer of Chicago, it does have all the elements of a cheese-fest. But the film is actually quite good and a lot of fun. This might be due to it being written by John Sayles, who wrote a number of fun B-movies, such as Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1981).

Robert Forester stars as the hard nose cop who is investigating a series of disappearances near different sewer outlets. He teams up with reptile specialist Robin Riker, and game hunter Henry Silva, and they set out to put an end to the 36-foot eating machine. This was still back in the early ‘80s when good taste really hadn’t come into play, so anybody could end up as alligator chow. Even kids. There is a sequence with the alligator in a neighborhood swimming pool, with some little kids playing around it that is something that you don’t see nowadays. It definitely fits the bill for a fun movie to watch in a group.

The Food of the Gods (1976) Our last film, we pretty much stayed in the same vein. We ended the day with this classic from Bert I. Gordon. Gordon’s films of the ‘50s always made use of camera tricks, making simple creatures into gigantic proportions, turning them into a terrifying monster, like The Beginning of the End and Earth vs the Spider. While during the ‘60s, he only made one “giant” film, he came back with a vengeance in the ‘70s with this film and Empire of the Ants (1977).

In Food, on a remote Canadian island, a strange goop pouring out the earth is used as an experimental animal food that Ida Lupino and her husband were giving to their chickens, causing them to grow to abnormal size. It was okay when it was just the chickens that grew in size to 7 feet tall. But when everything else gets into it, such as mosquitoes, caterpillars, and finally rats get into the food, the all hell breaks loose.

Marjoe Gortner is a football player that is on the island with some friends for some horseback riding and hunting. But when one of his friends is attacked by giant mosquitoes, he realizes that something strange is going on. But by that time, it’s too late to escape. He ends up at Lupino’s house, along with some others trying to escape what is happening. Pamela Franklin, a personal favorite of mine since The Legend of Hell House (1974), joins in the fun, along with Ralph Meeker and Belinda Balaski. Gordon really knew how to write dialog that would be entertaining for years to come. When faced with the possible demise from this giant rats, Franklin turns to Gortner, telling him she’s so scared to die that she wants him to sleep with her. Isn’t that always the case?

Also, there’s a big debate as to just what Gordon was doing to these rats during the filming When Gortner and crew are shooting at them with shotguns, while I’m sure Gordon was using just a paint pellet gun, it sure doesn’t look to fun for the rats, as they fly across the screen once they get hit.

So we made it through another year of fun, though this was not as hard as the previous year. Being AC’s first time doing this, we wanted to make sure he’d come back next year. But then, maybe we won’t be so easy on him…..