What's Eating You?

Food and Horror on Screen

Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Cynthia J. Miller, A. Bowdoin Van Riper

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501322419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food on screen-the ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. Among the questions it asks are: How do these films mock our taboos and unsettle our notions about the human condition? How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption? In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity, asking if what we eat truly matters? Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous "others" dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an "eat or be eaten" world.

Part One

Let the Eater Beware

1

Death at the Drive-Thru: Fast Food Betrayal in Bad Taste and Poultrygeist

Cynthia J. Miller

[Bad Taste] does for brains what McDonald’s did for hamburgers:

spread ‘em all over the place.¹

In 1976, the first McDonald’s arrived in New Zealand, beginning a gradual shift in the nation’s food consumption emphasis from lamb to fast food. Just over a decade later, Kiwi filmmaker Peter Jackson released the now-cult film Bad Taste (1987)—a send-up of fast food chains and their wares. The connection, many have argued, is no accident.

Bad Taste pits a slapstick New Zealand paramilitary defense force against aliens who invade the nation in order to harvest humans for their intergalactic fast food chain. The invaders, in the employ of Crumb’s Crunchy Delights and intent on factory-farming Earth for human ingredients, make the equation of Crumb’s and the multinational burger giant fairly straightforward as a cautionary tale of the ills of fast food consumption, as well as the exploitive practices that bring it into being.

In a similar, splattery caution against the dangers of America’s status as a “fast food nation,” Troma Studios introduced Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006), portraying the plight of everyday New Jersey consumers trapped in a fast food restaurant under attack by undead chickens. While animal rights activists protest outside the newly opened American Chicken Bunker, the chickens, destined for the fryolator, begin a grotesque rampage, killing employees and patrons alike. Viewers learn that, in addition to its gastronomic transgressions, the fast food chain had constructed its latest outlet atop an ancient Native American burial site. This willful desecration of sacred ground has angered the spirits of those buried there, along with those of the billions of slaughtered chickens sent to “concentration coops,” all of whom now seek their revenge.

Both films, while brimming over with gratuitous mayhem and gore, raise significant issues about the nature, pervasiveness, and consequences of fast food enterprise. Betrayal is the hallmark of consumers’ embrace of fast food culture, from a wholesale indictment of production—the harvesting of humans, the brutal butchering of chickens—to grotesque manifestations of the true nature of eagerly consumed “mystery meat” and the dangers it presents to those who ingest it. While exploring these “on the ground” issues, this chapter will also examine the larger, and even more monstrous, political-economic framework, as both films also speak to the multinational corporate betrayal of culture, as fast food, both literally and figuratively, walks on the graves of traditional lifeways.

Crunchy delights and zombie chicken

The young Peter Jackson shot Bad Taste—which pits an eager but incompetent team from the Astro Investigation and Defense Service against the invaders bent on marketing humans as the new intergalactic fast food taste sensation—on weekends, near his home Pukerua Bay, using friends and himself as the cast. As star Craig Smith (Giles) observes, “We were all oddball, nerdy fan-boys, hanging out together, going to movies and then trying to make a movie.”² Filmed over the course of four years, Bad Taste—Jackson’s first feature-length film—was produced on a notoriously low budget, yet achieved recognition almost immediately at Cannes and elsewhere for its innovative satire of genres, fast food, and Kiwi cultural identity.

The film opens with a pre-title prologue that sets the stage for the action that follows: A panicked emergency caller claims that the townsfolk of the small (fictional) village of Kaihoro, New Zealand, have been attacked by an unknown force whose arrival was accompanied by “a roaring noise and a big white light in the sky.” The offbeat protagonists—Derek (Peter Jackson), Frank (Mike Minett), Ozzie (Terry Potter), and Barry (Pete O’Herne)—known collectively as “The Boys” and bearing a closer resemblance to Pythonesque jesters than saviors of a nation, are sent to investigate the possibility of an alien presence. Their mission to bring back proof, in the form of a live alien, goes comically sideways when Derek tortures a captured suspect (the alien Robert, also played by director Jackson) while waiting for his team’s return, only to have the alien’s screams draw his companions, leading to bloody mayhem, Derek’s presumed death after a fall from the cliffs, and Robert’s escape.

As the team pursues their quarry, Giles, a famine-relief charity collector, passes through the village, but all of its residents have vanished. He is attacked by a hungry Robert, but escapes, seeking refuge at a nearby house that turns out to be cover for the aliens’ headquarters. Knocked unconscious and captured, Giles awakens to find himself bound, with an apple in his mouth, marinating in a tub of vegetables and broth (“Reg’s eleven secret herbs and spices”). It is here that the interweaving of food, eating, and the grotesque takes center stage. The aliens hungrily eye their dinner-to-be, noting that they haven’t had any meat since their arrival on the planet, and inform the panicked Giles that it is an “honor” to be consumed.

Giles escapes his privileged fate, however, when the team infiltrates the house. Disguised as one of the extraterrestrial minions, who are uniformly clad in blue work shirts and conveniently resemble dimwitted rural New Zealanders, Frank joins the aliens as they assemble for a triumphant speech by their leader, Lord Crumb (voiced by Peter Vere-Jones), an intergalactic fast food magnate whose empire is threatened by a fierce rivalry. He informs the workers that they will soon be shedding the reviled human form that they all have adopted, leaving Earth—taking with them the butchered and boxed remains of the residents of Kaihoro—and heading for home, to regain their place at the top of the fast food chain. “Isn’t it amazing how you can fit a whole town of humans into a few cardboard boxes if you slice off the fat?” he muses. “All the livestock we need are right here—four billion of them!”

At Lord Crumb’s signal, Robert is carried to a large bowl, held by the disguised Frank, into which he hurls a seemingly unending stream of green vomit, which still retains chunks of brain from his last meal. “Ahhh, I see the gruel is ready!” Lord Crumb pronounces. “Exquisite bouquet, Robert.” The bowl is passed from one alien worker to the next in a sort of communal dinner, and Frank, unable to avoid slurping his share, finds it surprisingly appealing. Crumb promises them a dinner party the next evening, with “fresh local meat” (the marinating Giles) to show his appreciation for their loyal service.

The team, of course, rescues Giles before he meets his end as the main course. Their escape route cut off, they have no choice but to battle their way out. Midway through the mayhem, Derek—not dead, but deranged, his brains held in place by his belt—joins the battle. As the Boys make their escape and Lord Crumb flees in the house-turned-spaceship, Derek, armed with a chainsaw, dispatches the alien leader, dons his skin, and warns the homeworld “I’m comin’ to get you bastards!” as the house careens into space.

Fueled by the supernatural, rather than the extraterrestrial, Troma Entertainment’s Poultrygeist updates the horrors of fast food for the twenty-first century. This “musical comedy horror” codirected by Lloyd Kaufman and Gabriel Friedman, six years in the making, also begins with a troublesome, if not so mysterious, prologue. High school sweethearts Arbie (Jason Yachanin) and Wendy (Kate Graham)—about to graduate and go their separate ways—meet late at night in the ancient Tromahawk Indian burial ground to nervously consummate their relationship and promise their undying love. Their transgressions disturb the dead interred around them, and soon, zombie hands rise from beneath them and join in the couple’s brief lovemaking, leaving the pair convinced that, for them, the earth really did “move.”

Fast forward one college semester: Arbie returns to the memorable site, only to discover that the burial ground has been bulldozed, and in its place stands an American Chicken Bunker (ACB) franchise—a transparent stand-in for Kentucky Fried Chicken—founded and owned by General Lee Roy, a villainous corporate magnate with a diaper fetish, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders. Outside the establishment, a protest has formed, made up of Native American rights activists, animal rights activists, environmental activists, angry lesbian activists (among them, his beloved Wendy—now a “leftist lipstick lesbo liberal”—and her lover Micki (Allyson Sereboff), and dozens of drunken hangers-on.

Disillusioned and seeking revenge, Arbie takes a tedious, minimum-wage job at American Chicken Bunker and is introduced to a range of oddball coworkers, who not only represent stereotypes of exploited fast food labor but whose names (like Arbie and Wendy) also evoke associations with fast food: Denny (Joshua Olatunde), an overbearing manager; Carl Jr. (Caleb Emerson), a perverse redneck; Paco Bell (Khalid Rivera), a gay Mexican; Humus (Rose Ghavami), a mysterious, burqa-clad, patriotic Muslim; and an unnamed middle-aged “lifer” in the chain’s employ, who is later revealed to be Arbie’s future self (Lloyd Kaufman), a harbinger of things to come. The monotony of their daily routine, however, is soon disrupted, as things spin horribly out of control, punctuated by full production musical numbers that add their own touch of irony to the film’s commentary on the wages of fast food.

The spirits of the Tromahawk tribe—and of all the factory-farmed and inhumanely slaughtered chickens—have begun to seek revenge on American Chicken Bunker, its employees, and its customers. The gruesome mayhem that follows is the no-holds-barred gore for which Troma Entertainment has become (in)famous: An uncooked chicken pushes Paco into the meat grinder, turning him into a “Sloppy Jose”; Carl Jr. loses his penis while violating another of the reanimated fowl in the storage room; and after eating mysterious, veined, pulsing eggs, patrons experience explosive diarrhea that leaves the walls, floors, and their fellow customers covered in blood, offal, and excrement.

As Arbie and his coworkers attempt to battle the “chicken dead,” Micki, Wendy’s girlfriend and leader of the protest outside, switches sides—proclaiming that the chicken is delicious, and then revealing herself to be both an employee of American Chicken Bunker and the General’s lover—resulting in throngs of protesters rushing to their doom in the restaurant and a disillusioned Wendy returning to Arbie. As the crowds consume the General’s chicken, they are possessed by the spirits of the chicken dead—sprouting beaks and feathers, then attacking and consuming their still-human counterparts in scenes that rival a zombie apocalypse. The inside of the restaurant brims over with bloody chaos—screams of terror barely drowning out satisfied belches.

As patrons and employees (along with the zombie chicken General) battle for survival, Humus sheds her clothing and reveals that she has C-4 strapped to her body. She sacrifices herself so that Arbie, Wendy, and a small child whom they’ve rescued can escape the slaughter. The building explodes as the three make their way to safety. Once on the road, however, the thirsty child drinks a soda saved from the restaurant and, after complaining of stomach cramps, lays an egg in the back seat. The car crashes and explodes, killing everyone inside, leaving the zombie chickens dancing in triumph to the film’s theme song as the credits fade.

The horrors of fast food

Neither of these films...