The Food of the Gods (1976) Review

WEEK 1: THREE CRAZY CREATURE FEATURES

The Food of the Gods (1976) Review

When animals attack in movies, they are usually increased in size, because when it comes to these sorts of movies, bigger is better. If there’s a way to make the attacking animals do so in great numbers—particularly in a swarm or pack—that’s even better. The Food of the Gods manages to do both, but probably not to the effect the filmmakers originally intended.

After an annoying opening credit sequence with football and freeze frames, a dull voiceover blabs on about pollution and nature one day rebelling (wow, that’s some subtle foreshadowing). The narrator turns out to be one of three guys who’ve gone to an island for a fun afternoon of hunting, until one of them gets attacked by what appears to be a giant mosquito. The narrator guy goes to a farm for help. All of a sudden, a chicken the size of a velociraptor from Jurassic Park attacks him in the barn, and he kills it with a pitchfork. Sounds random, right? It’s just a taste of what is to come.

The crazy old farm owner comes out and asks the guy to check something in her house. They discover rats have gotten into her special stash of food that has made her chickens grow enormous—the food of the gods, as the title implies—and the guy realizes the potential for disaster. They return to the mainland with their dead friend, unsure of how to explain themselves, and a doctor tells the narrator guy their friend was stung by at least 250 wasps. So apparently the giant mosquito was a giant wasp, and they have the poisonous strength of 250 regular wasps. The two guys head back to the island to investigate, and a pack of rats joins the mix. The giant wildlife attacks, forcing the two guys to join up with other hapless victims and set up a barricade at the farm.

This movie can definitely be filed into the so-bad-it’s-good section. I’m not even sure where to start with this thing. First off, the movie wastes little time getting to the giant animals. Every animal attack in the first half of the movie seems to come out of nowhere. One second, the characters are going about their business, the next second...bam! Giant maggots are eating farm lady’s arm! The attacks are hilarious, but many of them are also quite gruesome, and a few are even surprising. The randomness of the attacks adds to the fun.

There’s an assortment of characters, all thrown together in the latter half of the movie, but the only one that’s interesting is the farm lady. She’s kind of crazy, and you’re not really sure what she’s going to do or say next (her death is also the weirdest one in the movie). There’s a pregnant woman whose belly increases in size by at least 50 % over the course of the film, which takes place over a few days at most. She eventually has the baby while they are holed up at the farm, and she appears to make a full recovery after giving birth about five minutes later. It’s all depicted in a very casual manner, and that’s how everyone treats this entire outrageous situation. It’s more like an inconvenience than a horrific natural disaster; everybody acts pretty okay with it for the most part, and no one ever overreacts, which only adds to the absurdity. The dialogue is all hilariously bad, but unfortunately, there are no stand-out quotes.

What’s most hilarious, and the real reason The Food of the Gods is so damn amusing, are the creatures. Whatever photographic effect was used to depict the wasps, it somehow made them transparent, so in a scene where a guy is swinging a shovel at giant wasps, he’s not only swinging the shovel through them, the wasps keep fading in and out of existence. This is just one of many poor attempts at blending real-life animals filmed on a miniature set with the actors on a full-sized set. The giant chicken is only in the one early scene, and the giant rats are left as the main antagonists in the later half. There’s a mix of full-sized real rats shown to look huge and head puppets that reminded me of the ones in The Killer Shrews. In a few shots, you can see peanut butter smeared on the miniatures, which was clearly placed there to attract the rats.

The best scenes are the ones with the giant rats, and they are the most numerous throughout. However, the funniest scene doesn’t feature one of them. The funniest scene occurs when the two main guys are trying to blow up a giant wasp nest. If you’ve ever been around a regular-sized wasp nest in real life, then you know if you come within reaching distance, the wasps get pissed off and try to sting you. Apparently these giant ones just buzz around inside and don’t come out, because the guys have no problem sneaking up to the nest, shoving the bomb up into the hole, and blowing the thing to bits. It’s ridiculous and hilarious.

 

The Food of the Gods has plenty of goofy mayhem, and if you like campy animal attack movies, this should suffice. It moves at a good pace, packs in lots of marauding monstrosities, and is consistently entertaining. The ending is also just as funny as the rest of the events throughout, and makes me wish we got The Food of the Gods 2: The Cow Conundrum, but sadly, we never did.