Even before King Kong, jungle films in which scientists went into the dark underbelly and emerged not unscathed were a popular genre. A big reason why was that primates didn’t live in captivity at the time, so Tarzan films and The Lost World did big business.

Producer Ernest B. Schoedsack — and actual director of the humans in this movie — had earlier experience in these types of movies by making Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness and Rango.

There was also Ingagi, a movie that was a fake documentary about human sacrifice fifty years before Cannibal Holocaust. It’s also a completely reprehensible film that features black women making love to gorillas and giving birth to ape babies, which many today would find horrifying, but audiences spent $4 million ($63 million in today’s dollars).

King Kong isn’t as problematic, but it also recognized that when you put a sexy white woman into jungle peril, audiences are going to spend money.

The real start of King Kong was two years earlier, when David O. Selznick brought Merian C. Cooper to RKO as his executive assistant and told him that he could start making his own movies. He started with Schoedsack directing The Most Dangerous Game — a movie that continually gets remade in different forms to this day — and built a giant jungle set to make that movie (along with hiring Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray, who would play Carl Denham and Ann Darrow).

Cooper was also supposed to make Creation, a story of adventurers on an island of dinosaurs, with stop motion special effects master Willis O’Brien. Once he saw the test footage, he realized that all of the costly locations and dangerous real Komodo dragons could be scrapped and King Kong could be made in a single room. Creation was shelved and the big ape was on his way.

Cooper gave the writing job to best-selling British mystery/adventure writer Edgar Wallace — yes, the man responsible for the creation of the giallo — who turned in one draft before he died. That said, having the claim “based on the novel by Edgar Wallace” could mean even more box office.

After several rewrites, Schoedsack’s wife Ruth Rose (who also wrote Son of Kong, the 1935 adaption of She and Mighty Joe Young) finished the story, understanding exactly what Cooper wanted and basing the character of Denham on him, Driscoll on her husband and heroine Ann Darrow on herself.

Kong took eight months to make, so much time that nearly every actor had time to make another movie at the same time (and Wray made two, Dr. X and Mystery of the Wax Museum). To save more money*, the set from The Most Dangerous Game was used for all the jungle scenes and because the script was still being written — they had to hurry up and shoot before the set was taken down — a lot of that dialogue is improvised.

When you watch this movie, understand that its effects were as groundbreaking** — and time-consuming and money-burning — as today’s most advanced CGI. For example, there’s one scene where Fay Wray watches Kong battle the T. Rex. She had to sit in a tree for twenty-two straight hours of shooting to ensure that that scene looked perfect.

This movie even broke ground when it came to music. King Kong had the first feature-length musical score — instead of just background music — written for an American talkie film. It had a 46-piece orchestra and was also the first movie that would have three separate audio tracks for sound effects, dialogue and music. And to show how penny-pinching RKO was, Cooper paid for that entire soundtrack all out of his own pocket to the tune of $50,000***.

This wasn’t just a movie. It was an event. Premiere showings had seventeen acts before the movie even began, with troupes of African American dancers performing rituals and dances to get audiences even more frenzied for the appearance of Kong.

It’s still amazing how frightening moments of this movie are in 2021. In 1933, people had to be losing their minds. That also led to plenty of censorship, with scenes of a dinosaur mauling the crew members, Kong undressing Ann and sniffing his fingers and Kong dropped a woman who he mistakes for Ann to her death were all eventually cut from the film. There were also several instances of self-censorship, with a series of monsters, insects and spiders earing crew members and Kong battling a tentacled creature cut by RKO****.

As a kid, I watched this movie at least once a year. The WOR Holiday Film Festival always worked like this:

Thanksgiving Day

• King Kong
• Son of Kong
• Mighty Joe Young

The Day After Thanksgiving

• King Kong Escapes
• King Kong vs. Godzilla 
• Godzilla vs The Smog Monster

or

• Son of Godzilla
• Godzilla vs The Smog Monster
• Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster
• Godzilla vs. Megalon

I was fascinated and frightened by Kong, keeping a special issue of Famous Monsters in a back room of the house, afraid to even look at the picture of Kong’s face, sure that he could come out of the magazine and pull me inside his world, bringing me to Skull Island. Now that I’m older, I wish that that had actually happened.

*There was even more recycling, as the wall behind Kong on Skull Island was taken from Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings, which was used as part of Atlanta burning within Gone with the Wind.

**This is also the first movie to feature rear projection special effects.

***To be fair, RKO eventually paid him back.

****These scenes were found in Philadelphia in 1969 and added back in. In 2005, a 4K scan of the film added the best possible versions of this censored footage.

Also known as Slasher In the House, this is one of the few Thanksgiving slashers that I can think of — that said, I can tell you others are Deadly Friend, Blood Freak, ThanksKilling, ThanksKilling 3, Blood Rage, the remake of The Boogeyman, Kristy and Intensity — and it’s also a section 3 video nasty, so it has that going for it.

It also stars Body By Jake star Jake Steinfeld, who legend says refuses to discuss that he was ever in this movie. Dude, if he had Cameo, I’d pay to ask about this movie every single day. He plays PCP addict Jay Jones, a guy who has already destroyed his parents.

Harold Bradley should have never made Thanksgiving dinner for the nine victims in this movie, including his heavy metal son “Mistake.” But here we are, with car trunks getting slammed onto heads, stabbing nice young ladies and the aforementioned KISS loving son getting electrocuted.

Director Nettie Peña was an editor and associate producer on Dracula Sucks, so there’s that.

This is also the first role for Vanessa Shaw, who was Allison in Hocus Pocus (and also appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, Ladybugs and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes).

Seriously, Mistake should have been the killer, or better yet, he could have just run away and survived, heading off to Wisconsin where he and Marvelous Mervo would start a band that would destroy minds and reap souls when they both weren’t playing practical jokes, peeping on women and crying about how tough life was for them.

Also: more movies should have killers that inject PCP directly into their tongue before grunting like maniacs and killing everyone around them. Remember when people did PCP and would go nuts and turn into criminal supermen? Whatever happened to it after the video game NARC?

You can watch this on YouTube.

Somehow, this movie has nearly no humans and the wildest plot possible. In a world where ThanksKilling 2 was actually released, a movie that took Turkie into space, as you’d expect. Yet it failed to a level that anyone watching the movie died viewing it, so the studio destroyed it, all except for one copy that Turkie — now forced to be a normal family-having bird — wants to find, duplicate and destroy the world unless a series of puppets — Flowis the rapping granny, WiseTurkey, Muff, Yomi and Rhonda the bisexual space worm — created by Uncle Donny (Daniel Usaj) can stop him.

Huh?

Where Thankskilling was a slasher with a puppet demonic turkey as its villain, this movie just decides to throw everything inside the bird and drop it into a deep fryer to see what happens. Directed by Jordan Downey, who wrote this along with Mike Will Downey and Kevin Stewart, this has moments where everyone is turned into a video game, as well as Turkie saying, “Gravy” when he gets a chainsaw wing. If that makes you laugh, then you’ll love this. If you thought that was stupid, well, this movie has about 89 minutes more to attack you with.

I mean, this movie is quite obviously drugs and has a puppet’s anus being used to open a gateway to space. I love that I got to write that sentence.

You can watch this on Tubi.

My brother and I used to have a ritual where we’d go to K-Mart, the only place open around our small town, and buy a game on Thanksgiving day. But now, so much is open on the holiday, it’s not fun. It’s kind of rough on the people who miss out on their family. I think a lot about restaurants that stay open over the big turkey day and well, this movie has a diner that remains open only to be attacked by cannibals.

Directed and written by Erick Lorinc, this is a movie that revels in blood and gore, as the cannibals punish those that don’t celebrate that first Thanksgiving in the proper way, showing up like The Strangers and killing everyone in their way.

Much like how cranberries add to the seasonal meal, this film delivers that most perfect of slasher desserts: Linnea Quigley.

This holiday, don’t go shopping until at least the next morning. Stay out of bistros. And just hide out with your family. Maybe show them this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Somewhere along the way, the idea that Wes Craven was a genius became accepted fact. While I enjoy A Nightmare On Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes just fine, so many of his films fall apart and feel wildly uneven.

Case in point: 1986’s Deadly Friend.

The film was intended to be a science fiction film, based on the novel Friend by Diana Henstell. After Craven’s original cut was shown to a test audience, the audience felt let down that there weren’t any nightmare scenes or gore shocks. So the studio imposed reshoots and a new edit, ending in a film that veers from the wacky comedy hijinks of a robotic best friend with an old woman’s head being exploded with a basketball. Nearly any plot development was lost and we’re left with a main character who feels like an utter creep. A second set of test audiences hated the graphic violence and gore. You just can’t win.

That said — Wes Craven’s output is often marked by explanations of studio interference and bad test screenings and screwed up budgets. I understand that Hollywood is rough and the ghetto of horror movies — which he yearned to escape — doesn’t matter all that much to the bean counters. But seriously — there are more excuses than successes in the oeuvre of Craven.

Teenage science genius Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux, Little House on the Prairie star and former U.S. Pac-Man champion) and his single mom have just moved to town. Paul’s got one friend so far, newspaper boy Tom Toomey (Michael Sharrett, Theodore Rex and Savage Dawn). In one of their first conversations, they discuss withdrawn next door neighbor Samantha Pringle (Kristy Swanson, the future Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but mainly discuss her breasts. Yes, the boys of 1986 didn’t even hide what sexist jerks they were.

Samantha and Paul get close when she’s not being beaten into oblivion by her dad Harry (Richard Marcus, who played Dr. William Raines on the TV series The Pretender). But there’s a silver lining — they all have a robotic friend named B.B. that Paul built when he isn’t taking over the college classes he’s attending early or doing autopsies. And oh yeah — B.B. is voiced by Charles Fleischer, whose sub-Robin Williams mania only really worked in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Here, his voicing of B.B. will instantly remind you of Roger while grating on you with each successive second of screen time.

Other than the abusive dad and a motorcycle gang, the kids’ main enemy is the old lady who lives next door, Elvira Parker (Anne Ramsey from The Goonies and Throw Mama From the Train; it seems this was the role she did best, a harridan who makes people want to kill her). Instead of a tender Home Aloneexplanation of why she hates kids, she’s a one-note villain: she steals basketballs and fires shotguns, including a harrowing scene (or joy-inducing if you’re as annoyed by this robot as I was) where she murders B.B. with several blasts of hot lead.

After a Thanksgiving night first kiss with Paul, Sam’s dad gets so upset that he ends up shoving her down the steps to her death. She soon expires, leading Paul to go insane and try to bring her back to life with the chip he saved from B.B. This leaves us with Sam as a proto-goth robot zombie with superhuman strength.

What follows is pretty much why this movie is well-known — you’ve probably seen the animated GIF of Elvira’s head being splatted by a basketball — which is wall-to-wall mayhem. People get thrown through cop car windows, Sam dives from a second-story window and lands on her feet to no one’s surprise at all and the end if laughably tacked on, trying to be an ersatz Carrie, with her face graphically splitting open to reveal the visage of B.B. before she kills Paul. Also — the requisite studio asked for dream sequences are here and ready to bleed all over your eyeballs.

PS — that ending is also totally a studio conceit. Writer Bruce Joel Rubin told Fangoria, “That robot coming out of the girl’s head belongs solely to Mark Canton, and you don’t tell the president of Warner Brothers that his idea stinks!”

Seriously — executive vice president of Warner Brothers Mark Canton went mathematic on this film — demanding additional gore scenes be added to the film, each progressing in visceral excess. For his part, Craven would distance himself from the film, feeling that his vision had been compromised. Dude — you were making a movie about a girl being turned into a robot. He dreamed of crossing over like John Carpenter did with Starman. At the risk of being a jerk, I’ll just say what I’m feeling: Wes Craven was no John Carpenter.

Maybe I should be a little nicer. After all, Craven was dealing with anywhere from eight to twenty different producers on this film, as well as a divorce and being pulled from Beetlejuice and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Wow — I would actually love to see what Craven would have done with that one! He was also in the midst of a plagiarism lawsuit, as someone claimed that he had stolen the idea for A Nightmare On Elm Street from them. Craven claimed that he worked on Deadly Friend because his agent said to him, “You should do a studio film, because otherwise you’ll be stuck doing small films for the rest of your life.”

As for Rubin, he’d deal with similar studio interference on a later project, Jacob’s Ladder. Ah, Hollywood.

This is without a doubt the dumbest — and therefore most awesome — Thanksgiving slasher I’ve seen. It starts with a topless pilgrim woman being murdered by a turkey. A turkey named Turkie who was reborn through necromacy by  Feathercloud, a Native American shaman dishonored by pilgrim Chuck Langston. Now, every five-hundred and five years, Turkie rises to kill every white man he sees.

If you see a miniature totem pole, don’t allow your dog to piss on it. That just releases undead talking and murder-loving turkeys from their dark sleep. I usually dislike movies that set out to be funny, but this is a movie that has a turkey wear Groucho glasses to sneak its way past someone who doesn’t even noticed that they are speaking with a zombie ghost turkey.

Shot during the summer break between director Jordan Downey and writer Kevin Stewart’s junior and senior year of college — Brad Schulz also wrote the script — the team went on to make The Head Hunter as well as an even wilder sequel.

This was to be called Death Turkey in countries that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I love that title more than I can even write here.

A turkey uses a handgun. If you need more from film, you should really just be a grumpy old man.

If you’re ready to get the holiday started right, watch this on Tubi.

We’ve talked about Thanksgiving horror films before — see our list right here — but now there’s a new one. Directed by Mark Newton and Matt Stryker*, Derelicts is all about a dysfunctional family suffering a home invasion on the day that people eat too much, watch football and pass out.

There’s an actor in here named David Lee Hess, which might give away the home invasion inspiration for this movie. Actually, it seems to have a fair bit of Rob Zombie in it, if you like that kind of thing. But this does a fine job with a $150,000 budget, with really interesting flashbacks, flashforwards, long moments of silence and plenty of gore.

I mean, there’s a killer with a stuffed animal mask. That alone should probably give you a reason to watch this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*IMDB lists the director as Brett Glassberg, in case you are wondering.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because the expectations are so low. All you need to do is show up, eat food and fall asleep watching football, which is way less pressure than Christmas. While you lounge, here are some movies to watch and upset your entire family and start the holidays off right.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

In 2004, I stumbled across a copy of Blood Freak released as a special edition on the Something Weird Video label. I knew nothing about the film before I watched it. 90 minutes later, as the credits rolled, I held up the packaging to the heavens and proclaimed, “Every film I ever watch from this moment forward will be compared to Blood Freak.” Is it good? That depends on your point of view. Do I love it? Absolutely. It is, in this writer’s humble opinion, the best “worst” movie ever made. Not because it’s slow or boring. But because it’s a film that defies all logic. Made equal parts enthusiasm and technical ineptitude in Florida by nudist director Brad F. Grinter on a $25,000 budget, and star Steve Hawkes, it’s positively dripping with WTF moments. Blood Freak exists in a genre all its own somewhere in the center of a “Cult Movie” Venn Diagram featuring Sting of Death, Blood Feast, Reefer Madness, and the collective Christian works of Kirk Cameron.

The plot involves a biker named Herschell (in a nod to fellow Florida filmmaker H.G. Lewis) played by the box-bodied, pompadoured Hawkes himself. Herschell has just finished his service in Vietnam and needs to figure out the rest of his life. After assisting a girl on the Florida turnpike named Angel with her car trouble, she invites him home. There, we find Angel’s polar-opposite younger sister Ann toking up and sniffing poppers with her friends. Ann likes Herschell, who rejects her for an evening at Bible study with Angel and her elderly friend who just happens to need “a husky guy” to help out on his poultry farm. To mellow him out, Ann gives Herschell a laced joint by the pool, causing him to become addicted after one dose. The two quickly fall in stoner love.

Herschell gets a job at the old man’s turkey farm (where the sounds of real turkeys are augmented by human voices gobbling and whistling on the soundtrack) and agrees to eat some experimental samples injected with chemicals. The combination of the spiked weed and the spiked turkey causes him to pass out. He awakens a while later to discover he has transformed into a giant turkey monster. Well, more like a guy with a papier-mâché turkey head and feather scarf, but you get the idea. He’s a mutant game bird dependent on the blood of drug addicts. When he’s not out killing junkies and drinking their blood with his toothy beak, he goes home to Ann and gobbles softly to her about his plight. In response she ponders, “Gosh, Herschell, you sure are ugly. I love you. But if we stay together, what will the children look like?” Then they make sweet, sweet turkey love.

If it sounds insane, it is. It is the only film I’ve ever seen where the director periodically interrupts the proceedings to explain what the hell is going on. It doesn’t help but it sure is entertaining to watch Grinter glance down at his script every few seconds.

Fortunately, Herschell wakes up to discover the entire episode was all a hallucination. It turns out our hero was already addicted to pain killers from injuries sustained in Vietnam. Angel, Ann and the poultry farmer get him the help he needs and he and Ann walk off happily ever after.

Just prior to the conclusion, director Brad Grinter pays his audience one last visit to warn us of the dangers of chemicals in our food. All while chain-smoking and coughing. The message couldn’t be clearer. Grinter knows he’s a hypocrite. It’s an apt description given that he taught filmmaking at the same time he made a literal turkey of a movie comprising underlit, out-of-focus shots. Me? I love turkey. I searched for many years to find a gem worthy of the “Best of the Worst” title. Blood Freak is the reigning Gobbler.

Trivia: Blood Freak is filled with a lot of big cat imagery. Actor Steve Hawkes was rescued by a lion from a fire while shooting a Tarzan film in Europe. He spent the rest of his life rescuing big cats. Steve was the original Tiger King. 

To find out more about his life, which is worthy of a film on its own, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sipek