After premiering last year at Fantastic Fest 2015, directors Nick DenBoer and Davy Force have released their short film The Chickening, a reimagining / remix of Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining. It’s utterly bonkers. Check it out here…
Jack Torrance takes a new job as senior chief night manager for “Charbay’s Chicken World” —a state-of-the-art, volcano-fried, fast-food poultry production facility and resort strategically built on an active volcano. Jack travels to the remote facility with his wife, Wendy, and 42-year-old man-child son, Danny.
During orientation, Mansturd Nurlman (regional manager of Charbay’s) mentions a new experimental product that is currently under development: “The Shiny” — a brand new BBQ sauce created in the research laboratory deep within the radioactive volcano. Strange things start happening to Jack after he tries the sauce, and he slowly begins morphing into a chicken creature and becomes unstable and aggressive.
Scatmok (a hyperdimensional alien) conspires with Danny and his little friend Tony (a snarky Italian man who happens to be Danny’s index finger) to steal the recipe for “The Shiny” but their plan is compromised when they realize the horrific side effects of the experimental BBQ sauce. Danny and Scatmok decide they must destroy the BBQ sauce pipeline in order to stop the spread of this condition that has mutated Danny’s father.
Meanwhile, Jack has learned some of the restaurant’s darkest secrets from some of the other employees, including a potential cure for his condition. In the end, the restaurant is destroyed in a spectacular exploding BBQ sauce conflagration, with Wendy, Danny, Tony, Scatmok and a now-cured but frozen-solid Jack, who grumpily curses his former employers as they drive off in the Beak-Machine into the sunset.
Originally published January 28, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
