Turkey Shoot (1982)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) You may think that great movies make the grandest statements, but sometimes it takes a cheap and nasty exploitation picture to talk bluntly about things. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Turkey Shoot is not meant to be a deep or elegant film—but its exploitation shenanigans about human hunting and concentration camps find justification in bog-standard totalitarian government recast in future Australia, which does add some interest to an otherwise schlocky film. Otherwise, anyone’s reaction will depend on their tolerance for out-and-out exploitation for gratuitous violence, sexual content and sadism. Turkey Shoot does have some energy, but it’s not necessarily harnessed in productive directions: everyone involved in conceptualizing the film clearly wanted some common-denominator financial returns rather than try anything as ambitious as its own world-building. I found it slightly more interesting and better-executed than many of its bottom-of-the-barrel equivalents, but that’s not saying much.