As we gotta have a Bert I. Gordon film in the rubric every year, i figured we’d might as well knock off one of his lesser known films, as in, i don’t think color when i think B.I.G., but he did work until well beyond the 50s up into the 90s, and before passing away in 2023, he did screenwriting work for 2014’s Secret Of A Psychopath.
This is from the short lived “Wells period” of his career, working with Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures, though this isn’t the first time he adapted the Wells novella, since his 1956’s Village Of The Giants film also took the entire basic premise of a substance that makes people grow larger to join the giant humanoid trend of The Amazing Colossal Man but mostly used to make another entry in the “teensploitation” trend that was going on at the time with surf movies and shit.
This time is a less bastardized adaptation, and by that i mean it actually uses the H.G. Wells moniker and is slightly more faithful to book… at least its basic premise, since it doesn’t cover most of the more interesting chapters and its themes, it basically reduces it to another “nature revenge” plot, which indeed was all the rage after Jaws, as already discussed plenty of times.
Meaning this has more to do with the unproduced kaiju film Nezura (and -again – Jaws and the) than Food Of The Gods, since the focus here is on giant rats that have eaten the “FOTG”, in this case a substance springing from the ground in a farm in British Columbia, with the farmer, Mr. Skinner, considers it a gift from God himself, feeds it to the chickens, which grow to giant size, and so do wasps, grubs, and rats, making the island overrun by giant vermin.
Unaware of this, a professional football player and some his teammates head there for a hunting trip, but they get more than they wanted from it…
I say it’s more akin to Jaws…. but maybe actually a kindred spirit with Night Of The Lepus, even ignoring the rodent connection, there’s this dumb shlocky approach to it that make is feel it’s still the 1950s, and there’s also a goof where you can see one of the actors posing as rats showing its legs.
Also, like in that film, the actual animals used for filming are too cute to be treatening, and since it’s a 70s film, i’m pretty sure some animal abuse happened, though if you look frame by frame and pay some attention you can tell they didn’t actually kill rats in the scenes that it seems they did, it’s not immediatly noticeable but they used some pellets that squirted blood on impact on the rats themselves, and i don’t think they outright killed the animals.
So at least even this has one over Kingdom Of The Spiders.
It’s honestly impressive how the effects can go from being fairly decent in craft (not so much execution) to complete laughable buffoonery, like the wasps that are obviously superimposed puppets and become even worse as in many shots you can just see their traced silouhette due to the cheap, unrefined optical effects that do belong in the ’50s, as Bert I. Gordon is still using his old bag o’ tricks and you can tell.
the scene when they fight the wasps in the farm is basically an analog version of the Birdermic coathanger bird battle, and no, i wasn’t expecting to ever say that, but here we go, but at least i’ll say that this film can be genuinely funny because it’s obviously not trying to be, its just very badly written, the decent-to-good cast can’t do much with such a terrible script, there are some characters that basically confirm they’re ok with the idea of being chewed to death by a rat, a wasp or a grub.
Or a giant cockarel.
It’s funny due to good ol’ incompetence and dated effects, though i still find enjoyable seeing practical effects for these killer animals films, and this isn’t THAT bad, at least you get a decent variety of giant killer animals eating people, even if the plot is thin enough that the subplots about various people being on the island or inquiring about the “food of the gods” exist to provide more chow for the giant animals and up the bodycount.
It’s subpar killer animal hokum from the 70s that feels like the 50s in spirit and in effects, with most of not all the same techniques used 2 decades prior by Bert himself, so it checks out, but even some of his older films from that era are better, this isn’t one of his best, but there is some fun to be had, especially in laughing at the effects that are dated but also weren’t much effective back in the 50s.
Also, it goes without saying, but it is an awful adaptation of the story itself, i would love to drag the movie into the dirt more for this if it wasn’t also very loosely based on the Wells’ novella to the point it could have been based on frigging Nezura: Horde Beast (or the infamous Night Of The Lepus, which did came out just 4 years before), and it’s not like Food Of The Gods ever got a proper film adaptation ever since. And i assume never will.
The ending hints at a sequel -maybe loosely covering the latter parts of the novella – but that went nowhere as there was a Food Of The Gods II film, one of those sequels in name only, with a completely different plot and not even directed by Bert I. Gordon.
I mean, it was AIP most successful film that year, so it makes sense they pushed out a “sequel”, and a bit of trivia is that one of the rat costumes was used later for the dreaded Star Wars Holiday Special, though i’ll take this at face value because i’m not in a hurry to double-check.
The next year B.I.G will get to adapt another H.G. Wells book, the short story Empire Of The Ants, which i’ve seen described as his worst one ever, so i’m looking forward to eventually feature it sometime in the future.
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