Repossessed (1990)

Since it's turkey-hunting season again, I know I'm gonna get major flack from Wanda Bodine as soon as I whip out the old full-choke twelve-gauge, jump into a camouflage jumpsuit, and put on my hat with the little ear flaps.
For the last three, four years, Wanda's been on this animal-rights binge which includes TURKEYS. Like they're not gonna die anyway! Like the zoos of America are gonna close because there aren't enough TURKEYS to look at!
I told her, "Wanda, there is nothing strange or perverted about blowing the head off a gobbler and splattering a little turkey flesh on a tree trunk. The whole country was founded on this principle. The Pilgrims did it."
But she won't listen. She thinks a human being with a twelve-gauge shotgun has an ADVANTAGE over a turkey. And I've told her, "Wanda, there's more turkeys that escape than there are getting wasted. We only kill the stupid ones. It's important that the stupid turkeys die. Darwin said so."
But you can't use logic on this woman. So this year I'm gonna set down the complete rules and procedures of turkey hunting so that all you un-American Pilgrim-haters can understand.

1) We don't chase down the turkeys. No man could move that fast while luggin a beer chest. We sit in a hollowed-out tree log with bushes on our head, and we make a female turkey noise with a little reedy rubber gizmo that sounds like a fat man blowing his nose. If you're a male turkey, this sounds like a female turkey is saying, "Hey, Rambo, wanna party?" When you hear a gobble, that means a tom turkey is answering back, "I'm gonna clean your transmission, honey"--and, as soon as he gets close to you, you unload both barrels of buckshot and watch him crumple to the earth and bleed to death. In other words, it's like working Times Square.
2) But let's say you don't want a tom turkey. You want a female. Most females are smarter than the males, so about the only ones you have a chance with are the jail-bait female turkeys, the ones that were hatched this spring. You can buy a honker called a "Kee Kee Run" that will make em think they're going to an M.C. Hammer concert. Sometimes ten or twenty of em will run up to you together, like you're the New Kids on the Block road manager. You can kill a lot more of these, because they're smaller. We professional turkey hunters call this the Roman Polanski Technique.
3) But the true turkey-hunting experts want to get old gobblers, the ones that are so old they don't mate anymore, and so you don't have a chance using the singles-bar line. They're just like human old people, though. All they wanna do is sit around and talk to other old turkeys and complain about their children. So what do you do? You make these HORRIBLE yelping sounds, which is what old gobblers sound like when they're whining, and makes the elderly turkeys think YOU are an elderly turkey, too, and so you MIGHT be willing to listen to him. You're making these noises that, to the turkey, sound like, "Have I told you about my kidney problem?" And so they slowly wander over to you, but they're ornery. They don't trust you. You've got to keep talking forever--and it's worth it, because they're the biggest turkeys you can kill. And so you throw in stuff like "There hasn't been any decent music since Tommy Dorsey died," and "That Sid Caesar--now THERE was a comedian." And pretty soon the turkey comes over to bore you--only, as soon as he does, he gets three tons of shotgun pellets in his cute little elderly Mr. Grandpa Turkey face.
And Wanda thinks this is cruel to animals.
This is an ART FORM.

And speaking of huge turkeys, "Repossessed" sounded like a great idea: Leslie Nielsen performs an exorcism on Linda Blair. But it's one of those deals that can't decide whether it wants to be a pure-dee Naked Gun ripoff, with 9,000 sight gags, or have a real honest-to-God comedy plot, and so it's neither fish nor fowl, turkey nor carp. It's got some horse laughs in it, but you keep going "Shouldn't I be laughing again by now?"

I don't wanna be TOO hard on it, though, because Linda Blair IS the ultimate drive-in star of the eighties. As rassling announcer Gene Okerlund says, "Nice breasts, but a face I wouldn't wanna wipe my feet on." (Actually, he doesn't say breasts. He doesn't say atomic duffel bags, either, but he should have.)

Actually, even when Linda Blair is spewing vomit all over her family, like she is in this movie, she gets more attention from red-blooded American males than Playboy Playmates do. Whenever we wanna pump up the ratings on my cable show, we show a Linda Blair movie. I'm not kidding. Something about that East German shot-putter look that just drives the guys WILD. For once in my life I'm stumped. I can't figure it out.

Four breasts.
Chunk spewing.
Poodle dog ground up in a tree-branch compactor.
Fire-breathing.
One motor vehicle chase.
745 sight gags.
Evian holy water.
Gratuitous rap song.
Gratuitous Wally George.
Gratuitous Jack Lalanne.
A 54 on the Vomit Meter.
Split pea soup Fu.
Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Anthony Starke, as the Catholic priest who motivates himself by reading "Believe in Yourself, by Charles Manson";
Bob Logan, the same writer and director who made that timeless video classic "Up Your Alley," for having the courage to put an Oliver North joke in a 1990 movie; Leslie Nielsen, as Father Mayii, for saying "Luke, remember, when you fall on your face you're still moving forward";
and, of course, Linda, for caking on the cracked-skin makeup, ratting her hair, puckering up again after all these years, turning herself into a giant ice-cream cone and screaming "Lick me! Lick me!" What an actress.
Two and a half stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

"Repossessed" is available on video and on DVD