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| Images courtesy of Troma Video |
The Children producer-screenwriter
Carlton J. Albright who co-wrote the film with co-star Edward Terry was another
one of those film workers who became a one-and-done writer-director with the
1989 Troma Entertainment Chicagoan shocker Luther the Geek, a microbudget
slasher involving a carnival geek who bites off chicken heads and goes on a
killing spree.
Given a limited release
in 1989 before falling through the cracks on its original VHS tape run via
Troma Video which gradually gathered steam in 2005 on an official Troma DVD,
this microbudget regional meat grinder prominently starred Edward Terry as the
titular Luther the Geek involving a killer who behaves and clucks like a
chicken in between biting out the jugulars of innocent bystanders with his
metallic dentures. Its all very stupid
and weird but the gory visual effects aren’t bad despite the artist taking his
name off the film and it definitely packs a Southern Fried punch that’s
somewhere between Herschell Gordon Lewis, Devil Story and The Dentist.
Luther Watts as a child (Carlton Williams) is transfixed by the carnival geek, watching a bald drunkard in a cage being egged on by townsfolk to bite the head off of a live chicken for another round of booze. Inexplicably due to how the film was shot and edited, it appears that Luther gets his teeth knocked out by an airborne severed chicken head the geek spits out or something like that. Jumping ahead two decades, over time in which Luther (now an adult played by Edward Terry) has become mute and murderous before incarceration in a mental institution, the board of directors (for the sake of the movie) inexplicably set him free back in the world where he immediately causes upheaval and terrorizes the residents of a local grocery store by eating raw chicken eggs.
With no motivation, Luther bites the throat out of an elderly woman on a park bench and thus begins his murder spree of clucking like a chicken, moving his head about like a chicken but quick to chomp away with his newly fashioned sharpened metallic dentures. His exploits send him hiding in the backseat of a single mother Hilary (Joan Roth) on her way back to her secluded farm where her daughter Beth (Stacy Haiduk) also resides when she isn’t having fully nude shower sex with her biker boyfriend Rob (Thomas Mills). It doesn’t take much longer for Luther to sneak into the farm, massacre the chickens and begin wreaking further havoc on Hilary’s family. Only a young cop passing through (Jerome Clarke) seems to be their ticket to freedom if only the psychotic chicken clucking maniac doesn’t eat everyone first.
Luther Watts as a child (Carlton Williams) is transfixed by the carnival geek, watching a bald drunkard in a cage being egged on by townsfolk to bite the head off of a live chicken for another round of booze. Inexplicably due to how the film was shot and edited, it appears that Luther gets his teeth knocked out by an airborne severed chicken head the geek spits out or something like that. Jumping ahead two decades, over time in which Luther (now an adult played by Edward Terry) has become mute and murderous before incarceration in a mental institution, the board of directors (for the sake of the movie) inexplicably set him free back in the world where he immediately causes upheaval and terrorizes the residents of a local grocery store by eating raw chicken eggs.
With no motivation, Luther bites the throat out of an elderly woman on a park bench and thus begins his murder spree of clucking like a chicken, moving his head about like a chicken but quick to chomp away with his newly fashioned sharpened metallic dentures. His exploits send him hiding in the backseat of a single mother Hilary (Joan Roth) on her way back to her secluded farm where her daughter Beth (Stacy Haiduk) also resides when she isn’t having fully nude shower sex with her biker boyfriend Rob (Thomas Mills). It doesn’t take much longer for Luther to sneak into the farm, massacre the chickens and begin wreaking further havoc on Hilary’s family. Only a young cop passing through (Jerome Clarke) seems to be their ticket to freedom if only the psychotic chicken clucking maniac doesn’t eat everyone first.
Where to begin with this one? The kind of thing that could only be made independently as no major studio would come anywhere near this concept let alone this movie, Luther the Geek in a brainstorming session sounds like reprehensible commercial suicide. If you can get your mind around the idea of a clucking twitching chicken-man with bulging eyes and a kind of Frankenstein monster feral innocence unleashed upon the world, it mostly functions as a home invasion thriller involving a mother-daughter pair trying to survive an unthinkable situation. Like most exploitation horror flicks before it, there’s the over-the-top gore with simulated scenes of chicken heads being bitten off including a silly gross-out sight-gag where its entrails stick to the severed head.
And then there’s that shower scene which feels like an excuse to disrobe and jump Stacy Haiduk in her screen debut but to her credit she’s a good sport about it and later conveys shell shock far more realistically than a film of this ilk deserves. Mostly though, its the Edward Terry show seeing a guy take on a role most actors would laugh off before throwing the script in the trash. On paper there’s no reason this should work other than a farce but Edward Terry oversells it to such a degree it becomes kind of disturbing onscreen. He’s really the only reason anyone should bother with this thing.
A certifiable beer-and-pizza regional horror flick with the usual ingredients of gratuitous sex and nudity tossed in to spruce up the chicken man mayhem, the film finally saw its high-definition debut via Vinegar Syndrome in conjunction with Troma Video to do a new 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negative in 2016. Fairly stacked with extras including archival Troma Video extras ported over from the DVD, a director commentary and a new video interview with Jerome Clarke, the limited-edition release included reversible sleeve are and a collectible slipcover for first buyers.
88 Films, when they were still a UK exclusive boutique label, also put out their own restoration of the film featuring a slightly different aspect ratio. While there are still a few copies left of the Vinegar Syndrome edition available online, they’re running out and as with Frightmare the rights seem to have reverted back to Troma Video. Utilizing the same transfer and extras, the new Tromatic Special Edition is pretty much a port of the Vinegar Syndrome release in case you missed out on that edition replete with the same extras. Encoding on the VS disc might be a little bit higher quality but with a film like this, take your pick.
--Andrew Kotwicki