Animal abusers are the biggest pieces of shit in the criminal justice system. So much so that when you proposition a person to defecate on your chest you no longer ask for a Cleveland Steamer, you instead ask for a Michael Vick. THAT is how shitty people who abuse animals are. And it’s to those pieces of human waste that I dedicate this review to, in the hopes that they too will one day meet their maker at the rubber talons of a giant cock… and by that, I mean rooster… though suffering the indignity of being beaten to death with a dildo would also be a deserving end for their like.
Based on a story by legendary sci-fi author H.G. Wells (and no, it doesn't stand for "Hud Gomer" neither) that I've never read because, well, as you can probably tell by most of these reviews, I am in fact illiterate. This is why I always tell the kids to "Don't be a foo', stay in schoo'". Everyone thought I was just being whimsical and "fresh" by dropping the 'l' from the words "fool" and "school", but the awful truth is that before then I had never been taught the letter 'l'...
Food of the Gods is yet another production from schlock-meister Sammy Arkoff and his cheeseball factory known as American International Pictures. Yes, it's another good ol' time of bad movie merriment from the fine fucks at AIP. The synopsis (as narrated by our sensitive hero guy Morgan, played by Marjoe Gortner looking his Ben Murphy-est) is your basic "Mother Nature fights back" hippie tree fucker tale about a handful of football players who take a break from their homoerotic sport to enjoy the simple life out in the country, where man's corrosive touch hasn't tainted Mother Nature with the STD known as pollution. Of course Morgan reflects on something his crazy old dad used to say about how nature would one day turn the tables on man and fuck up humanity's collective cabbage patch for tracking his poison all over Mother Nature's carpets and always forgetting her on Arbor Day. When exactly will this planetary PMS attack start up? Oh, about seven or so minutes into the movie, when one of Morgan's buddies is attacked... BY A GIANT RUBBER WASP! The guy must have some kind of latex allergy too, because after 30 or so seconds of trying to get the big rubber plaything off of his back, the guy starts to swell up badly before turning into the bloated corpse of a 98 year-old drowning victim. Not a pretty sight.
When Morgan goes for help, he pokes around the nearby Skinner farm and gets cornered by a pissed off rubber rooster head and its subsequent rubber talons of doom. Sure, it's comically fake and a riot to watch, but at least the rubber rooster head is slightly better than the big papier-mâché one in Blood Freak... Anyway, Morgan, being the dashing hero type (with goofy '70s man perm) that he is, kills the beast with a nearby pitchfork. He's approached by Mrs. Skinner, who introduces our man to what's making the local fauna so friggin' huge: strange white ooze that's flowing from the earth like one of Mother Nature's festering pustules. Mr. and Mrs. Skinner rationalize that it's theirs, as given to them by God himself for being good little sheep and praying to Mr. Uses Clouds For Toilet Paper their entire lives. They mix it in with their chicken feed and grow enough white meat to feed themselves for a century and still make a nice mint off of selling the rest at market. Of course you know problems are going to arise when you store this so-called "Food of the Gods" in old mason jars and uncovered bowls, because not only have the wasps acquired a taste for Jesus' Man Chowder, but so have the local rat population... though it's the massive flesh eating maggots and make my creepies crawl...
While returning home from trying to sell the goo to a corporation, Old Man Skinner blows a tire and is the first to be chowed on by the ravenous rodentia. That's what you get for driving a German car in an American movie, Jackson! To help up the body count, we pack in a few more people to the area, including a pregnant couple whose RV gets stuck nearby and a pair of reps from the company Mr. S was working out a distribution deal with for Momma Nature's Tapioca recipe... completely ignoring the bloody, maimed wreckage of Skinner's VW on the way there. It all comes to a head with the group trapped in the Skinners' house and fending off a final siege by the toothy terrors. Morgan's buddy and public relations guy Brian (John Cypher), corporate douche bag Jack (Ralph Meeker) and the charmingly ignorant hillbilly Mrs. Skinner (Ida Lupino) all succumb to the jaws of defeat before it's over, leaving us with five survivors (counting the couple's baby boy, delivered to help heighten the drama I guess) to walk away from the mess once the rats have been drown (see the movie), which is probably four more than we would have had if not for our star quarterback declaring martial law. It all wraps up with one disturbing notion: what's going to happen now that all of the God jizz has been washed downstream and injected into the surrounding ecosystem? All I can say is that you might want to switch your kids over to soy-based dairy products before you're stuck raising a generation of Sloths. "HEEEEEEEEEEEEEY YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOU GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUYS!"
Sadly, Food of the Gods is a movie that should never have been cleaned up for its DVD release. With the exception of those grotesque giant maggots, all of the monsters effects for the movie are terrible and actually benefited from the worn out, grainy film of the movie's prior VHS incarnation to help cover-up the lifeless rubber "giants", rat puppets, and super-imposed images of cute, docile animals smeared with fake blood and shot with paint (some even in the face!) while crawling over toy cars. I half expected the model house in the finale to be made out of Lincoln Logs™. Okay, it may not be as bad as Night of the Lepus, but it's still cringe worthy... in a bad way. I love the concept of the movie, I enjoy the performances from the cast (always good to see John Cypher, while Ralph Meeker makes a perfectly good dickbag), I'm always a fan of the secluded "middle of nowhere with no communication with the outside world" setting, and the epilogue is perfect, but the faults of the special effects in an older movie like this should never be shoved into our faces all the harder by cleaning up the footage. The audio may suck, but I'm gonna have to stick to my old VHS for future viewings. As for the movie itself though, it deserves its own chapter in the big book of "Nature Run Amuck".
DVD Xtras: Though I'm glad that MGM put out an affordable release of the movie as part of their "Midnight Madness" collection, I'm actually a bit disappointed that they wouldn't opt to slap this onto one of their double-feature releases. There are NO special features on this disc and when I say NO special features, I mean we don't even get a trailer or one of those pointless still galleries. Even if they couldn't get the rights to the sequel,
GNAW!, I'm sure MGM could've dug up a suitable killer animals flick to slap in with it. Then again I could just be getting greedy, in which case I'll no doubt suffer a rubber cock beating of my own if I don't straighten up...
