Flickhead’s To-See List: “Plucked”

Fowl play: Gina Lollobrigida and Ewa Aulin

Before the internet, the only time I ever read or heard anything about Plucked (1968) was the following capsule review by Joe Dante in a 1974 edition of Castle of Frankenstein magazine:

    “Weird Italo-French thriller doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of its marquee billing (‘Gina Lollobrigida — Plucked!’) but qualifies as a genuine curiosity mixing murder, sci-fi, social comment, sex perversion and sheer absurdity in distinctly European tradition. Chicken breeder Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose psycho-sexual sadism activities will be completely missing from TV showings, plots to push wife Gina into grain crushing machine and marry Ewa Aulin, who is plotting with her own lover to kill Trintignant and take over the chicken business. Subplot has radioactivity creating headless, wingless chicken mutants.”

    Such things could only rouse the imagination of your humble narrator then in his sixteenth year, prompting me to keep an eye on late night TV listings. Local stations used to show a lot of weird stuff at two or three in the morning, before cable (we were being warned about ‘pay TV’ — see below), back when no one knew what a VCR was. I did spot Plucked only once, playing on New York’s WOR in the middle of the night, but dozed off before the thing even started.

Above: Before anyone knew what HBO was, this prophetic public service announcement ran for years in theaters.

    If Dante were writing his review today, he’d call the picture a giallo. I’m sure fans have videos under its various titles — La Morte ha fatto l'uovo, A Curious Way to Love or, my favorite, Death Laid an Egg… but this post on Movie Morlocks says it’s still hard to find. If anyone can hook me up with a copy, I’d be forever grateful!