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THE FOOD OF THE GODS
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| Rated PG
| | Copyright 1976 American International Pictures.
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Reviewed by Andrew Borntreger on 9 October 2007
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A football player (Marjoe Gortner) and his friends take a trip to enjoy the great outdoors, but one guy encounters a swarm of giant wasps that sting him to death. Some loopy backwoods man and his likewise loopy wife discovered mysterious goo oozing out of the ground and fed it to their chickens. Despite looking like pancake batter, the goo was not palatable until it was mixed with chicken feed. That did the trick, and the chicken coop was soon filled with birds the size of buffalos.
Unfortunately, the farmer and his wife did not store the Food of the Gods in a canning jar, thus allowing the wasps to feed on it. Worse than the wasps are the rats (you would think that people living in a rustic cabin in the wilderness would be veterans at preventing rodents from raiding the larder). Soon, a small group of people, including a greedy investor who wants to steal the goo, the investor's principled female assistant, the football player, and a young couple anxiously expecting the birth of their first child, are holed up in the cabin and fending off a horde of ferocious giant rats.
I liked the White Rat, who might have been a NIMH alumnus. He obviously had a basic understanding of electrical engineering and fluid dynamics, making him the smartest individual in the whole movie.
Bert I. Gordon directed the film, and the special effects are what you would expect from him - most of the time. The giant wasps looked absolutely terrible and any time a person was attacked by a rodent of unusual size, a fake rat head (which looked more like a vole) was used. Most of the shots of real rats made to look larger than wolves were passable, but one scene, with Gortner shooting at a pair of rats on the roof, was really well done.
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| Things I Learned From This Show: | |
|  | Anything that weighs more than 400 lbs is scary (including fungus, chickens, and girlfriends).
| | | Being an avid skeet shooter could save your life.
| | | A portable generator can electrify miles of metal fence.
| | | Shotgun shells are actually miniature sticks of dynamite with small lead balls inside.
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| | | 23 mins - The coroner must have missed the fact that the corpse had a single large hole in the center of his back.
| | | 28 mins - You thought she was a rat? No, he is in the other room.
| | | 48 mins - Honey, I'm about to get eaten alive by gigantic rats. I'd like you to be with me when it happens.
| | | 78 mins - My experience with a woman in labor is that she would be screaming for somebody to cut that sweater off of her because she was too hot.
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