Category Archives: 366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: BAD CHICKEN (2013)

DIRECTED BY: Carter Mays

FEATURING: Isabelle Gardo, Michael Palaniuk, voice of David Schweizer

PLOT: A chicken convinces a beautiful woman to participate in a fake reality TV show, hoping to seduce her.

Still from Bad Chicken (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s got a sociopathic chicken, which is something you don’t see everyday, but it doesn’t have enough weird huevos to crack the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Bad Chicken sets me to wondering about the dilemma of low-budget filmmaking. What can you do to set yourself apart from big-budget pictures? Bad Chicken is well-shot, well-lit, well-edited, with a good score (by Schweitzer, who also voices the main chicken) and an accomplished credits sequence; technically, it’s television show-quality affair (thankfully, it doesn’t stoop to mimicking the handheld production values of the reality shows it mocks). I could imagine some steroid-fed variation on this idea playing in theaters, with 3-D CGI chickens and a second-tier comedian like Kevin James voicing the bird.

A comedy about cute puppets engaging in politically incorrect bad behavior would have been an underground outrage in 1989, but in the 2010s, after Seth McFarlane’s Ted, it’s straight cineplex stuff. With bad taste mainstreamed in the post “South Park” world, there’s less and less the underground can give us that Hollywood isn’t be willing to supply, only with bigger names and higher production values. Bad Chicken has a decent enough gimmick and it makes for a watchable enough comedy, but it doesn’t push the outrageousness meter to the lengths it would have to go to get noticed. Sure, there’s a (non-explicit) montage of Charlie Chicken picking up hookers for hotel room trysts, and a scene of two chickens dueling with dildos, but there’s nothing here you couldn’t see done better on a cutting edge TV-14 sketch comedy show. The situation is absurd, but the big punchlines never arrive (there are no poultry-based puns, which seems like a gamble in a chicken comedy).

On the plus side, starlet Isabelle Gardo (not pictured) ruffles some feathers with her satirical turn as a shallow, celebrity-obsessed bimbo; she appears to have a minor orgasm from reading an email announcing that she has been selected as a reality show contestant. Her performance, however, is mainly impressive in the sense that it makes you hope to see her in something a little bigger. This is the dilemma low-budget independent films find themselves in: it’s not enough to be just as good as regular entertainment. They have to be better, weirder, or at least make your blood boil when you watch them. They have to have zero restraint, they can’t leave any bad taste on the table. Bad Chicken isn’t a bad watch—it’s a painless way to kill ninety minutes—but it works better as an advertisement for its makers’ potential to move up the production ladder than it does as on its own as a wicked cult item.

Bad Chicken was picked up for distribution by Gravitas Ventures, which specializes in video-on-demand distribution. The film can be screened digitally through Amazon, Itunes, etc., and can be rented on a number of American cable networks. DVDs can be purchased directly from the makers at the official site.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…part media satire and part hallucinogenic weirdo comedy.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image (contemporaneous)

366 UNDERGROUND: DEAR GOD, NO! (2011)

DIRECTED BY: James Anthony Bickart

FEATURING: Jett Bryant, Madeline Brumby, Paul McComiskey, Olivia LaCroix, John Collins, Shane Morton, Nick Morgan, Rusty Stache, Nick Hood, Jim Sligh, Rachelle Lynn, Jim Stacy

PLOT: The Impalers are a vicious motorcycle gang rampaging across the land indulging in drug trafficking and other antisocial behavior, like rape and nun killing. After a shoot-out in a strip club, they top off the party with a home invasion, whereupon their paths cross with a mad scientist, his daughter and associate. They plan a night of fun, with humiliation, rape and murder on the menu… but the scientist has something unexpected in the basement. Meanwhile, there’s something in the woods that’s killing animals and quickly working its way up the food chain…

Still from Dear God No! (2011)

COMMENTS: Dear God, No! (official site) is another throwback to the grindhouse flicks of the 1970’s, when political correctness didn’t exist. It goes balls to the wall with the 5 B’s of Exploitation Movies – Bikers, Bullets, Boobs, Blood, Beer – all of which are in ample supply… and adds another ‘B’ to the party – Bigfoot. Like most of the neo-grindhouse films, there’s lots of loving homage on display, and most of it is done very well. Unfortunately, DGN! falls into the same trap as most other trash throwback films do, that of overkill… everything is intentionally over the top, way too much to take really seriously or to really get offended by. There’s no real sense of transgression, which most of the actual 70’s grindhouse features actually had; and, most of the comedy and acting here is really labored. That said, on the technical side of things it’s good, solid low-budget work. It’s a fun ride, and it looks like the real thing—arrested adolescents will bow down in praise, feeling ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ for over an hour. Afterwards, they’ll be wanting something a bit more substantial. So will you, probably.