House
A horror movie starring Richard Moll and George Wendt. What else do you need to know?
Critters
Delightful and inspired flick about outer-space creatures who eat people.
Santa Claws
Get into the holiday spirit with the worst Christmas movie ever.
Elvira
The Mistress of the Dark in her very own movie. And guess what? It's damn entertaining.
Jack-O
Movies this terrible prove that Satan walks among us.
Creature Feature
I watched 'Creature From The Black Lagoon,' and it inspired me to do something really idiotic.
Food of the Gods, a 70s cult entree served up by Bert Gordon, was loosely based on H.G. Wells' classic story of the same name. The film was unabashedly terrible, combining the worst script in the universe with legitimate and documented animal cruelty that's made horror enthusiasts hunt it down for decades. Far lower on the totem pole lies it's sequel, creatively titled Food of the Gods: Part 2. Made in 1989, the second installment tried everything it could to recreate the offbeat appeal of the original. The experiment failed, for many reasons:
A) Cult flicks can't be forged by design. They just have to 'happen.' When Richard O'Brien sought to recapture Rocky Horror's lightning with his 1981 follow-up, Shock Treatment, many fans couldn't stand the film's obvious desire to be a cult movie. Even the most devout R.H.P.S. enthusiasts wrote everything but the movie's soundtrack off, and this was for a series with a much bigger following than Food of the Gods. Cult movies have an intangible quality about them - it's not something anyone can just create by using grainy 8MM cameras for some of the shots.
B) For a movie crafted sheerly for the sake of being weird, Food of the Gods II is downright boring. There's very few 'money scenes,' and you'll have to endure a great deal of emotional torment to get to 'em. Remember the number one rule of bad movies: they can be silly and stupid, but they can't be boring. The flick plods along worse than a one-legged 90-year-old with a busted walker.
C) The first Food of the Gods film had its share of fans, but they were nowhere near numerous enough to warrant an exploitive, cash-in-quick sequel. This one actually could've been more successful by using an entirely new name and focusing the advertising on what it really was: a dumb horror movie about giant rats.
Believe me, I had to pluck this movie apart for hours to find enough suitable material to warrant a review. It's 90 minutes long, but only 15 of these minutes can't be used as a natural sedative. I guess they were trying to get across some message about the dangers of screwing with nature, but it's pretty tough for a movie to act preachy when it includes scenes of guys melting, and other guys getting their dicks bitten off by huge rats. You really can't use things like that as backdrop props for a political message, but I'd expect nothing better from Food of the Gods II. Here's my sort-of-subsidized review. I had chopped out most of the boring and/or pointless scenes, but I wasn't really left with anything afterwards so I had to chuck some of 'em back in. You suffer for my word quota, what can I say? Enjoy the review, but don't even think about renting this mess...
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Neil Hamilton, a good-natured biochemist, gets a call from one of his old lady teachers. She's got a problem. A BIG problem. While trying to alleviate the symptoms of some poor kid's stunted growth, she tried out an experimental formula which increased his size to a hideously abnormal degree. As a side effect of the rapid growth, the kid has become extremely vicious and angry. And ugly. Even more outstanding is the fact that his pajamas seemed to grow right along with him. Neil promises to study the dangerous formula and attempt to conjure up an antidote.
At his lab, which not-so coincidentally is under fire by a group of animal rights protesters, Neil tests the formula out on a tomato plant. And by golly, it works! Within a scant few hours, the tomatoes fly right out of the cherry stage, straight through beefsteak, and zoom directly into the HOLY MAAM THOSE ARE BIG TOMATERS! Now that the formula is a proven success, Neil needs to figure out a way to reverse its effects.
We get to meet the movie's secondary stars at this point - Neil has a girlfriend who shows less emotion than the tomatoes, a scientist colleague who keeps trying to steal his work, and the aforementioned group of protesters who serve as death fodder for the oncoming fleet of killer rats. Oh yeah, speaking of rats - one of Neil's subordinates suggests trying the formula out on living creatures, so they gather a cage full of lab rats and go wild with the syringes. In a move that should surprise no one, everyone leaves the lab immediately following this, confident that no trouble with come of the unattended and soon-to-be huge rodents. For a supposedly brilliant group of scientists, these guys tend to overlook some pretty obvious safety measures. Sure enough, the protesters break into the lab to wreak havoc, and inadvertently release the rats from their cages. Some of them die, too - the protest leader gets his entire face eaten off. Here, take a look...
Gotta give some credit to the crew for the giant rat special effects. I'm assuming they crafted mini-sized pieces of furniture and then filmed normal rats running all over 'em. This isn't exactly a deduction worthy of Sherlock's praise, since the only other way they could've filmed these scenes was by literally creating giant rats. Rest assured, had Food of the Gods II been made in more recent years, the big rats would've been lame computer-generated graphics.
Don't get me wrong, not all the effects are this cool. Scenes that require human characters to be attacked by the beasts are accomplished by poking the actors with vaguely rat-shaped masks attached to broomsticks. They superimpose normal-sized rats into other scenes, which would've been perfectly acceptable had the rats stayed to scale from shot to shot. Sometimes the rats are two feet long, other times they're fifteen feet long. And on occasion, some of them float above the ground, seemingly able to walk on thin air. The movie was enough of an acid trip without the sporadic inclusion of giant rats that could fly.
All this aside, Food of the Gods II managed to do something no other movie could. You know how it's common for slasher-type flicks to have loads of scenes with victims being dragged away by the paramedics in bodybags? This film is no different, racking up an impressive 15-20 instances of the ol' bodybag-to-the-ambulance conga line. So, what separates Food of the Gods II from all the rest? They're working from a script that actually calls for each and every one of those twenty bodybags to be unzipped, revealing a bloody corpse for the camera's wandering eye at a rate of one dead body per every six minutes.
Too bad there isn't a Golden Globes category for anything of that sort; Food of the Gods II could've been the first killer rat movie able to call itself critically acclaimed.
Neil tries to convince the director of the college campus where our friendly rats are roaming about to close the place down. The loathsome director declines the offer, citing that there's a lot of money at stake and no veritable proof confirming the existence of these creatures. You know, aside from all the dead bodies with foot-long chew marks. I gotta tell you, Neil has got to be the most boring starring hero in movie history. Worse than Mariner from Waterworld and Jake Lloyd combined. It's not that I hate him - really, he's quite likable. I'm just not totally sure he isn't really an android programmed to emote poorly. The guy who plays him has had a few others film roles in his career, but Hulk Hogan has like sixteen fucking movies, so that's no major achievement. Brother.
At the risk of sounding excited about Food of the Gods II, we've just about hit the movie's good scenes. Well, they're not really 'good,' but they're decisively interesting. The film quickly loses all interest in playing it straight, instead opting on luring us in with banal character convos until our eyes are locked to the screen in a dumbfounded trance, and just before you casually slip away into a coma - BAM! They throw something like this at you...
Neil, asleep at the lab desk, starts dreaming. With a mind haunted by the terror of giant rats to kill and giant kids to save, it's only natural that he'd dream about what would happen to him if he turned into a giant. While there's nothing criminally wrong with that, the dream quickly morphs into one of the wet variety, showing Neil stripping his girlfriend down to her birthday suit before proton torpedoing her Death Star like a sex-starved convict. Soon enough, he begins growing to an enormous size while copulating, leaving us no choice but to assume that in the Universe of Dreams, Neil's girlfriend exploded because the dick currently inside her of her grew too large. Even within the boundless realm of the Universe of Dreams, that's a pretty retarded thing to have on your tombstone. I really pity the girl. Not enough to look up the character's name or anything, but there's still some level of remorse swimming around my viscera. I envision the remorse manifesting itself in the form of a small rat - but it would admittedly take some serious against-the-odds betting to wager that the remorse in my viscera knows how to be ironic.
While all that was just a dream, this next scene actually transpires within the film's story:
Neil's competing scientist, previously established as a villain character, dies a horrible death while messing with the growth formula. After testing it out on a tumorous mass of cancer, the scientist accidentally pricks himself and becomes hideously diseased. I thought they were gonna end it with a few bumps, but the scene goes on for sixteen hours as the poor guy just mutates, over and over again, into increasing levels of melting flesh with gooey organs spilling all over the place. If you're wondering just how bad this flick could actually be, keep in mind that I'm considering this as one of the good scenes.
Food of the Gods II has one truly memorable moment, and we're just about up to it. The aforementioned campus director wouldn't close the school because of the forthcoming grand opening celebration of their new indoor pool facility. I mean, really, would you hold off on that inaugural pool party just because a few of the locals were eaten alive by giant rats? Neil wasn't very understanding to the plight, but I think the rest of us see where the campus director was coming from. Still, maybe Neil was right. On the night of the celebration, the foxy partygoers find out the world's best kept secret: even giant rats know how to swim. They can swim and eat children at the same time! Huzzah! Heart those smart rats! Heart 'em!
Given the film's previous attention to not completely sucking, I didn't have much hope for this scene. I'd read several reviews that spoke about how great it was, but I refused to believe that Food of the Gods II could possibly top the death-by-dick dream sequence. Oh, how wrong I was. This scene was magnificent, absolutely brilliant stuff. The special effects gods shined upon the cast for this part, helping them turn what should've been an incredibly lame 'action-off-camera' climax into a bloody madhouse with rats graphically killing everyone in sight. If you rent the flick and fast forward straight to this, there's a good chance you might consider Food of the Gods II a modern day equivalent of Citizen Kane. It's rats, rats, rats everywhere. And they keep eating human heads. It makes you feel so warm and fuzzy.
It's here that the movie finds its charm and lands a niche. It should've just been a straightforward flick about giant, killer rats. No biochemical bullshit, no silly protests, no scientists melting into yogurt - just LOTS and LOTS of BIG rats who KILL people. Then again, I'm sure this scene ate up most of the film's budget, so it's understandable that they'd spend the other 80 minutes doing absolutely nothing of note. At least it's a unique premise, you know? Most of these sorts of films focus on the more obvious macabre monsters - spiders, bats, dark birds, snakes, sharks, gators, and so on. Rats were a pretty creative choice. Parrots would've been more creative, but it's tough to make parrots appear menacing. Unless they can teach 'em to do their cracker catchphrase in Bela Lugosi's voice. God I really don't like this movie. I'm fond of the big rats, though. My inner jury is hung. I hope the rat-shaped remorse doesn't squirm through my viscera and eat the inner jury. Hey, heart those smart rats!
Neil's pet rat, who had been purposely injected with the growth serum so they could track down the other rats, meets a grim end in a shower of police bullets. I forced my girlfriend to watch this with me, and she ended up feeling pretty bad for the innocent white rat. In turn, I felt bad for her for feeling anything towards a character in Food of the Gods II. There was a whole lot of 'feeling bad' going on, which wasn't shocking considering the movie currently being watched. The rest of the rats die, too. The police just go absolutely apeshit and shoot each and every one of them into pieces. Again, it's fairly graphic, so gore fans shouldn't be too disappointed.
You're probably thinking that the movie would end here, but you're forgetting that one little loose end we've yet to tie up. Remember why Neil had the growth serum shit in the first place? To save that poor, giant kid! Let's see how that turned out...
Neil: Hello! Professor Ladyhands: Hello. Neil: Hi. Professor Ladyhands: Yes, who is this? Neil: I. P. Professor Ladyhands: I.P.? I.P. who? Neil: I.P.....Address! Bwahahah! Hahah, this is just Neil. I fooled you! Professor Ladyhands: You damn geek. Did you make an antidote yet? Neil: Indeed. Around sixty people died in the process, but at least that kid won't be too tall anymore. Professor Ladyhands: People died? What are you talking about? Neil: Oh, we somehow mutated a bunch of rats into giant rats, and they ate pretty much everyone on the campus. You've got no idea...this payphone is covered in eyeball juice. Professor Ladyhands: I had a feeling this would happen. Neil: Yeah right, Doc. You had a 'feeling' that a horde of giant rats would eat half the kids in the city? Suuuuure.
And such and such. Since it'd be somehow wrong for Food of the Gods II to have anything resembling a happy ending, things close out with a bit of a cliffhanger...
The little kid grows even larger and more angry, snaps the woman's neck, and escapes. Can you believe that there's actually people out there who haven't seen this masterpiece?
Overall: If you're into these kinds of movies, I guess there's a small possibility that you'll make it through Food of the Gods II without setting fire to your television. Conversely, there's a far greater possibility that you'll grow an intense hatred of rats and bad actors sheerly be association, so consider the risks before a rental. The film's predecessor is way better in terms of shock and schlock, but things kind of balance out for the sequel since it has more titshots. All in all, it's an awful and usually unentertaining display that's just about ruined the year for me. Skip this one - if you're yearning for a 'natural menace' horror flick, seek out Kingdom of the Spiders or even Lake Placid instead.
