THE CHICKENING Might Be The Craziest Thing You See in 2016
Last week, I wrote about a totally bonkers remix of the Batman v Superman trailer and at the time, I thought it would be a long while before I saw anything stranger than that. I was wrong.
BirthMoviesDeath pointed me to this absolutely insane video called The Chickening, which is a riff on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining created by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force. Get a load of this (and warning — at least one shot is NSFW):
If you're still able to comprehend human communication after watching that, BMD has an interview with the filmmakers that's worth checking out in full. I'll snag a few choice lines below:
Why chicken? I grew up on a chicken farm and then worked in my dad's poultry butcher shop until I was 17, de-boning and slingin' chicken carcasses. You can't shake that shit.
My co-director Davy Force and I have been talking about doing this mega, next-level film remix for years and we finally had some free time last March to bust it out. We're both animators/vfx artists/remixers and we have collaborated on a lot of similar projects, so this came together pretty naturally. The Chickening is a proof of concept we made to pitch around to studios, namely Warner Bros (hence The Shining) in a bid to create a series where every episode is a different remixed classic film. It's a lot of fun to do and we think it's got a lot of viral potential, but obviously there's a lot of red tape in acquiring and regurgitating Hollywood's sacred cows...
There's lots you probably missed the first time through. Maybe the pictures of ISIS on the wall behind Jack in the office, or the box of chicken-flavored condoms, or the pile of Tommy Wiseau references. This thing is loaded with Easter eggs and designed to be watched a bunch of times, so you'll keep seeing new details. Kubrick was like that with all the details, too, and we think - although we sort of defaced his film - that we are still paying homage to a great piece of cinema. We wanted every still of this thing to have a WTF vibe.
The short was actually supposed to be a 22 minute project with a narrative that makes a bit more sense, but they ended up cutting it down to this version and it's been making the festival circuit. Here's the synopsis for the full piece, and you can start to see how — amid the utter insanity on display here — it could actually function as a real story.
I'm still reeling from my first viewing of this thing. What do you think?