An absolute waste of money

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Blistering performances.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I had a lot of problems with this film, mostly because its nowhere near what you'd expect. The "Food" that is causing all of the animals to grow to incredible sizes affects Bees, Worms, and other animals on the island. The main threat however, are the giant rats, that prey on humans. The first parts of the film are pretty good, but after the halfway point, the film tends to drag itself out a bit. Don't get me wrong, this movie is way better than some of the other giant rat movies I've seen, playing on the natural fear of rodents. What makes it worse is that it is psychologically trying (but telling you why would include spoilers).

Bert I. Gordon, veteran director of many such "giant" films of the 1950's returns to the genre with this loose adaptation of the H.G. Wells story, though this focuses on the consequences of the titular food, which has inexplicably oozed from the ground of a remote Canadian island, where an unfortunate group of people(including Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Belinda Balaski, Ida Lupino, and John McLiam) find themselves besieged by giant worms, wasps, and especially rats, who ate the food and now are after everyone... Idiotic film has variable F/X, but killed by plot holes, dumb decision making, and an overall air of ugliness and brutality. Utterly pointless and contrived as well, though a cult favorite of some. Consumers best beware...

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.

Advertised as based on "portions" of the H. G. Wells novel, this muck has virtually nothing to do with that text. A couple of farmers on a small island apparently find a substance that oozes to the surface which they quickly decide to mix with chicken feed and feed to their chickens. The chickens grow to phenomenal sizes as do the bugs likes bees and wasps and worms that eat this and later the rats. The whole story is preposterous but unfortunately for we the viewers we get a wrap-a-round story of a football player and his two chums taking a hunting vacation on the island. Why? I guess the director Mr. B.I.G himself - Bert I. Gordon - thought the extra story was needed. He was right in theory but was proved wrong - way wrong - in execution. This movie fails miserably on most levels. It has a few good scenes - okay, almost decent ones. The director has really little skill, and he has shown that throughout his career. I find movies like The Amazing Colassal Man and its sequel entertaining, but Gordon's early 50's work is definitely his best work. By the 70s his work was so poorly crafted amidst higher expectations from audiences. Gordon still was using cheaply crafted special effects. Here we get "giant" animals in miniature set pieces(a Gordon trademark), large plastic animals, a huge rooster on strings like a puppet, and filmed rats crawling over various vehicles and a house(I think the films were layered). We get a substandard cast who either cannot act(Marjoe Gorter in the lead) or some reliable(usually) character actors who are out of place or asked to phone it in(Ralph Meeker and Pamela Franklin) or a once proud actress/director on the skids of her acting career(Ida Lupino). You really cannot blame any of them. This movie reeks! Generally I find something likable to films like this, but this one didn't seem to have much that interested me except the ending. Finally much needed relief came.