The Food of the Gods (1976)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

When this movie showed at a small movie theater down the street, the marquee (which used magnetic letters) said, "Now Showing. Food of the Gods." During the night, someone switched the letters around and made it "Food of the Dogs." This was apropos in that it was probably the worst movie to appear that year at the theater. It has a stupid plot, horrible actors, and looks cheap. Anyway, that anyone would bother to pretty much remake an awful 1965 film is a little jaded. The H.G, Wells story is a lesser work but it is ten times the story here. If it's on TV, don't bother. By the way, who the heck was this Marjoe Gortner guy? I do remember his hair, but that's about it.

I should give this move a "10" simply based on the fact that I remembered watching it when it first came out at the age of 7. This was one of those movies that my mom watched after my brother and I "Went to bed". Little did she know we would often sneak out of bed and peer into the living room where we could clearly see the television. At the point that this movie first showed it's ENORMOUS SIZED animals we were glued to the screen and so enthralled that we couldn't look away. It was only in our dreams that the horrifying scene of the gigantic rats haunted us both again and again. Over the years the nightmares came less and less but the title never left my head...when I just happened to come across this movie that has been tucked away in my mind since I was a little girl I just had to tell you what kind of impact it had on a little 7 year old girls and her 5 year old baby brother. Although the movie is a far stretch from realistic by today's standards back then it was terrifying! Way to go Food of the Gods!!

I am glad I've seen this movie in the sense that survivors of disaster are often grateful for the life experience, but I felt the need to warn others who may be considering it.I won't attack the acting as a movie this low budget often has to pull winos off the street, and I do make due allowance for the effects budget too, though there are some effects which are just inexcusable in a movie intended for release.The famously bad giant chicken scene I'll gloss over, not just because it's famous but because the rest is much, much worse.The most unforgivable effect is surely the "giant wasps" which are motionless, brown silhouettes of some sort of crushed insect, possibly a butterfly or moth, certainly not a wasp of any kind. Probably the same brightly coloured lepidoptera to which our hero points, as it perches on a jar of Food Of The Gods, and proclaims "wasps sure seem to love it" To be fair the giant rats are quite realistic, but they're actually too realistic in that they haven't been given exaggeratedly evil features, or even shot from an angle that makes them seem sinister as in The Unknown. The result is that they're just gosh darn cute, like being attacked by giant hamsters or gerbils. So when the head of one comes smashing through a door, the audience isn't inspired to jump, just to go "aaaw, hello!".There's one point where they blow up a dam in an effort to drown the giant rats, even though real rats can swim because "giant rats with that weight won't be able to" this is true but it also unnecessarily raises the point that they wouldn't be able to move at all, and would probably break off their own feet. But what is far worse is that the "dam" they decide to blow up is in fact just a wall, hastily built across a small track which is not low enough to be even a very small river bed. And the wall is made of wooden planks. Yes wooden planks. Held together with nails. As a dam. To hold back water.But the worst thing about this movie by far is the script. Expository dialogue is sadly common enough these days, but this writer attempts expository dialogue, without even actually explaining anything! Our hero: "How did you come to feed it to the livestock?" Farmer's Wife: "well when we realised it wasn't oil, there weren't nothing for it but to feed it to the animals" Audience: "WTF? so anything that isn't oil gets fed to the livestock on your farm? Pebbles? Children? Discos?" And then there's the inevitable attempt to come up with a group plan. Coward:"we can't stay here, I'm leaving, come with me" Girl "but we'll die and get eaten!" Coward: "have you got a better plan?" Girl "I guess not" Audience: "so you're going along with the plan of dying and getting eaten because you haven't got a better plan?" I love low budget cheese, but seriously take my advice and just don't.

I first saw this movie at the local drive-in theater when I was about 13yrs old. It scared the you-know-what out of me back then. I just rented the DVD and sitting there on my sofa, in my mid 40s I enjoyed it all over again! Sure, it's silly....very "B-rated" type film....but if you just accept that going into it, you won't be disappointed. In this day of Computer Generated garbage, it's refreshing to see REAL special effects. The rats are still scary some 30 years later! Rent it, enjoy it for what it is: a campy, silly scary movie. I just love it! It saddens me to see that it's made it's way onto several "worst movie" lists. Relax people, enjoy it! I've gotta go....I think I hear rats coming.....