In movie circles, there is ongoing debate as to whether 1929’s The Taming of the Shrew ever contained in its credits this curious attribution: “by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor”. 1976’s The Food of the Gods says it is the work of H.G. Wells, but writer and director Bert I. Gordon is excessively humble. Clearly, the script is almost entirely from his own imagination.
I would have thought the food of the gods was little chocolate donuts fresh from the freezer, but it appears I am wrong. Instead, it is some sort of white goo bubbling from the ground in what I first thought was another appearing of the titular substance from The Stuff. Like that movie, people seem to inexplicably think a mysterious substance oozing from the ground is fit for consumption.
Farm couple Ida Lupino and John McLiam at least have the good sense to not eat it themselves. They, alas, make the inexplicable decision to feed it to their chickens, and the poultry won’t even touch it without it being mixed into their feed. That is a lot of trouble to go to when one doesn’t know what this stuff might do. It would make as much sense as bottling up a likely pollutant out of a river and deliberately feeding that to your animals.
One can imagine Colonel Sanders spraying his shorts when we see the results of this experiment. The chickens are taller than a man. Well, most men, as it wasn’t clear whether they are taller than Marjoe Gortner, who encounters the giant fowl during a vacation away from the football field, as he is an NFL player. If one was to believe this character was part of Wells’s original story, then the author had some amazing foresight, being able to predict such a thing as American football would eventually exist.
Gortner encounters the inordinately large birds when he inexplicably breaks into Lupino’s shed. He does this while searching for help after a friend of his is stung to death by a giant hornet. Lupino offers little assistance at this point, and she will soon be preoccupied with the giant larvae of some sort which have invaded her kitchen.
The biggest threat, however, will prove to the giant rats which torment the various groups on the island, all of whom will soon be trapped in Lupino’s house. There are Gortner and friend Jon Cypher, Ralph Meeker and employee Pamela Franklin, and Tom Stovall and pregnant girlfriend Belinda Balaski.
It seems strange any of these characters would be on this island, however attractive the scenery might be. I especially never had a firm grasp on the nature of Meeker’s character, whether he was a government official or an industrialist. The actor mumbles his dialogue to the extent it is nearly impossible to discern a word he says. I genuinely wondered if the actor had had a stroke, given how unintelligible he is at times.
He and bacteriologist Franklin have arrived at the invitation of Lupino to see the results from feeding the contents of the mysterious jizz fountain to chickens. One thing I found incredibly odd is, when seeing the poultry after they have been consumed by giant rats, all Meeker or Franklin speculates about it how the chickens met their demise. Yet they take completely in stride there are giant chickens, no questions asked.
Such odd behavior by all the characters is perhaps the most unusual aspect of the production. Stovall and Balaski initially stay behind in their RV upon the first offer of help, though there is no apparent reason for them to do this. I have no idea of Gortner’s intention when he takes Cypher to see if that couple’s claims of giant rats are true, though Gortner was already aware those creatures exist. Also, there are two vehicles available, yet Gortner takes his open-top Jeep instead of Meeker’s sedan, when it seems like a closed-top vehicle would be better protection from an attack of giant rats.
For allegedly being the hero, Gortner is a massive jerk through most of the runtime. He’s bossy and willing to risk the lives of others based on wild-ass guesses and strange assumptions. When hatching a plan to kill the rats, he surmises the economy-sized version of the rodents won’t be able to swim. He concludes this without any empirical evidence, and Cypher argues that even hippopotamuses can swim. Then again, Gortner seems to be easily confused. He sees the swollen face of his friend who was stung to death and says, “Jesus…” In real-life, our hero was an evangelist when he was a child, so he should know damn well that guy isn’t Jesus.
The saddest performance is from Lupino, though that is only because it is lamentable to see somebody with such a rich legacy in Hollywood be brought so low. It is a testament to her professionalism that she can deliver with a straight face such lines as “The good lord gave it to us because we’re deserving people.” Most of her lines will concern her dead husband, and those two were never even in the same frame together.
Bert I. Gordon did not just write and direct this, but also has a credit for “special effects by”, and I rolled my eyes when I saw that, thinking “oh, they’re going to be special all right”. Given he had previously failed to convincingly bring the world giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End and giant ants in Empire of the Ants, I figured this would be just as bad. Instead, they are a mixed bag.
I’m not sure what insect the larvae we see are supposed to be, but they are very effectively gross in appearance. The wasps are largely puppets superimposed over the footage, and they are almost always transparent. The chickens are either an optical effect to put otherwise normal sized birds into the same frame as humans or a person in what is likely only the head of a chicken costume. The latter has a quality to it like a sports mascot, and the same applies to the heads of the giant rats when we need to see somebody attacked directly. Like the chickens, there is also enlarged footage of real rats matted into shots with humans, resulting in such laughable gaffes as rodents crossing the point where they start dissolving.
At least the footage gathered on location looks better than most of Gordon’s non-studio work. Still, I wonder why there is so much footage of the island’s ferry, aside from possibly to pad out the runtime. There’s even a rather long shot of a sign saying “Ferry Traffic Only”, and I was like, “Oh, thank God we established that.” Also, I never had a firm grasp on the geography of the island, and was especially confused by a dam on the shore, which is supposed to block the water surrounding the island. I have only seen a damn on a river, and I wondered how one was supposed to block out an entire surrounding body of water if it wasn’t a wall around the entire island.
The Food of the Gods is very bad, though sometimes in an enjoyable way for those who like to laugh at bad movies. I’ve heard Joe Dante is not that kind of viewer, and he disapproves of films receiving the Mystery Science 3000 treatment. But even his first killer animal film, Piranha, had vastly superior effects to this. Balaski went on from this picture to be in many of Dante’s movies. Watching Gordon’s film, I’m betting she was happy to make the leap.
Dir: Bert I. Gordon
Starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray