It was Glinda, the good witch of Oz, who left us with one of the more durably relevant descriptions of the personal characteristics required for survival, not to mention success, in Hollywood. Well, not Glinda, exactly, but Billie Burke, the veteran actress and widow of famed Broadway showman Flo Ziegfeld, who played Glinda in MGM’s 1939 movie version of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy novel. Burke, who survived quite nicely out there for decades, remarked that survival needed “…the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor and the physical stamina of a cow pony.”

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is the latest limited release from Troma Entertainment, the rapscallions behind such lowbrow, high camp productions as The Toxic Avenger and Surf Nazis Must Die. If you’ve ever seen a Troma film there’s no need to read the remainder of this review, which is offered in the spirit of a pubic service announcement to unsuspecting cinemagoers.

Jonathan Demme’s breakthrough film, 1977’s Handle with Care (you may have seen it under the title Citizen’s Band) ends, in the classical format of comedy, with a wedding that, like the wedding at the end of The 40 Year Old Virgin, serve as a celebration of how much we have come to know and like the characters we’ve just spent the evening with. One of the most humanistic of American filmmakers, Demme has never, to my recollection, made a film about people he didn’t seem to care about, or at least (in the case of villains like Something Wild’s Ray or Silence of the Lamb’s Hannibal Lecter) people he wanted to understand.