The Aluminum Fowl opens with a young man with a chicken in his hand. His hand slowly clenches the fowl’s neck, and then he starts twisting. Soon, he twists the poor chicken’s head off, then drops the body only to watch it flop around. This is how he and his friends entertain themselves when they aren’t involved in cockfighting. Later, another young man holds up two of the smallest kittens you’ve ever seen close to the mouth of a snarling dog. Director James Clauer cuts the action elsewhere before we see that which our brains don’t want to even imagine. And these few descriptions are only the tip of the iceberg of what happens in the fowl little short documentary about a gang of rural American degenerates who love nothing more than to torture animals.
The purpose of this short is to expose us to something we don’t really want to see. For the characters it follows, no structure is followed. They don’t learn anything or feel bad for the things they do. It’s an infuriating experience that will probably cause you to wish for things to happen to these boys your brain never thought possible. Unfortunately, they exist in more places than not in this country. And that’s a scary thing to think about. If that was the actual purpose of The Aluminum Fowl, perhaps it wouldn’t have been such an abominable experience.
