Adventures in Fake Journalism: Thankskilling

It seems almost like kicking a dead horse to complain about a lack of verisimilitude in the movie Thankskilling, which featured a long sequence in which a killer turkey wore a dead man's face, and a number of people were convinced they were talking to that man. Despite the fact that he was three feet shorter, and a turkey.

Still, I want to point out the film's one attempt at building a prop book because, within the annals of weird/awful prop production, it stands out from the crowd, both because it was entirely unnecessary, and because the filmmakers solution was so utterly bizarre.

Mid-way through the film, the nerd character pauses to flip through a book about the history of thanksgiving, in the hopes that it might offer some clues as to how to defeat the evil turkey that's chasing them. It does, but the 'prop department' was unable (or unwilling) to write a few paragraphs about an evil magic turkey so that the book would look good during the quick insert shot when he's reading. So the product was this:

Overlook the fact that it's clearly a computer printout and focus on the text with me. The left side is largely illegible, but I was able to spot the name 'Bill O'Neal' and reference to his book 'The First Thanksgiving: It was in Texas!' (it wasn't, BTW). The right side is where the real action goes down, however - the bulk of the text comes straight from the most reliable source possible: the Thanksgiving Wikipedia page, but then the text following it is supposed to be in code. But rather than actually write a code, the 'prop department' did this:

A series of algebraic equations cut and pasted in sequence. I'll give the producers this: what they lacked in authenticity they certainly made up for in sheer 'never-seen-that-beforitude'.