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Ahh, yes. Good ole' Feeders. Feel free to mentally delete the word "good" from that last sentence, and it will be far more accurate. This is not a film that really need be seen by human beings for any of the usual reasons, but it does serve a useful purpose in that it provides a standard against which all other things can be measured and valued. At one time or another, virtually every film ever made has been labeled the worst film ever made by some or another guy, who has hyperbolically vented his or her dislike for a film that in all likelihood wasn't Feeders, but should have been if their sentiments were meant to be taken seriously. Feeders is a film that makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look positively sublime. This is a seriously shitty poopbomb of a film from the brownest regions of planet Crap in the Crap galaxy. Do not come here seeking enlightenment. Do not come here seeking plot, or characters. Do not come seeking entertainment. Do not come here at all, unless you're seeking shit. We found this film in precisely that way: deliberately seeking shit. We could hardly guess at the truly turd-o-riffic surprise awaiting us with this video. We'd seen bad films. We'd seen Night Siege. We'd endured Dark Future. We had survived Armageddon: The Final Challenge. Lightweights. This was what lurked underneath Satan's ass in the foulest pits of abomination. If one freeze-frames the "worst toilet in Scotland" segment of Trainspotting, one may, I believe, notice a copy of Feeders floating in yesterday's excrement as Ewan McGregor paws through it. Lest I run short of metaphors too soon, I'll get to the film at this juncture. The film sucks, but you'd already surmised that, I'll wager. The most professional thing about it is the box, which is positively horrid. It depicts the head of a stereotypical grey-esque alien rising above our planet, tagged with the line "Earth was only an appetizer." It's a lie, by the way. Earth is the only planet featured in the film, so the implication that the aliens go rampaging about other planets afterwards should be ignored. The more straightforward implication that the aliens even go rampaging over earth is also untrue. The aliens-all two of them-go bobbling and flying on strings over a small patch of woods. But the box is at least made of real cardboard and is the right size and shape for a VHS cassette, so it at least holds no real surprises. The film does, though not in the sense of plot-related surprises, as such a thing would by definition require an extant plot. The primary surprise is that the damn thing was shot on videotape. No, not the new Hi-Def videotape that Attack of the Clones and Once Upon a Time in Mexico were shot on, or even the quality of videotape that news broadcasts are shot on. I mean home camcorder footage. This is a home movie. How it ever got into major video chains is a mystery, which lends itself to theories of blackmail and compromising photos. Nothing else seems a sufficient explanation. That aside, the term "production value" was clearly foreign to the Polonia brothers, our intrepid schlockmeisters. Where to begin? Let's see. Cheesmo Video Toaster CG flying saucers. Paper-māche aliens on sticks with no articulated body parts (and no mouths to speak of, even though they somehow keep eating people.) One of the two aliens made for the film has a badly broken neck, and keeps slamming his head back and forth as if someone had inconsiderately placed a battering ram up his ass. Some of the worst dialogue and acting ever known to any species ever to live, including chinchillas. A cameraman who managed to catch a shot of his own reflection with the camera in one hand and a fucking Feeder in the other. Possibly the most inappropriately scored background music ever heard. Blood effects that were somehow too complicated to do on-site and just got superimposed onto the scenery later. Shots that are freeze-framed for no good reason. Severed heads that blink. Corpses that breathe. Shots stolen right out of Night of the Living Dead and stuck into this film just for the shits and grins. I don't mean copied or emulated, I mean duped right out of Night of the Living Dead and edited into Feeders. There's the park ranger who sees a flying saucer buzz by and worries that it might be a meteor that could "burn down the fucking forest." And then there's the running time issue. It's hard to get anything close to a feature running time when you have no plot to speak of, so they tried a few ingenious techniques. The primary one seemed to involve making every shot in the film last about ten times longer than necessary. I can picture the director on-site: "All right, start driving down the road! No, not that fast! You want to go slower. You want to get to the opposite side of the frame about an hour from now." Our "heroes," who earlier in the film hit a victim of the Feeders who had stumbled into the road and then just dropped his body off at the doctor's office and went on with their vacation like nothing had happened, hide themselves in a house in the woods and spend eight whole minutes searching it, even though it appears to be about the size of a shoe box, before finally concluding that the corpse-ridden abode is safe to stay in. One would have to watch this film on rewind for it to move any slower. And the other time-padding trick used here involves a couple of female characters that one of our two losers meets offscreen. He walks into frame telling Loser #1 that he's gotten them some dates for later that night (which provokes a curious response along the lines of "Girls? Eeewwww!"), except the girls are attacked by the Feeders before this alleged date can occur. One of them survives the horror of having vaguely alien-shaped wads of newspaper thrown at her from off-camera, but it little matters, as she never shows up again. I'd venture a guess that partway through this grand production our wanna-be (or maybe really don't wanna-be) actresses got fed up and said "screw this," which didn't stop the filmmakers from clumsily shoehorning the existing footage into the film anyway. And for all this stalling, the film still clocks in at only sixty-eight minutes, which is about sixty-nine too many. The film waits until the end to hit its lowest point, however. Loser #2 gets kidnapped by the aliens, and then returns, followed by an alien double that's stolen his form. They never appear in frame together where you can actually see both of their faces, and wrestle about Captain Kirk-style, until Loser #1 kills one with an knife and finds out in a bit of truly tragic irony that he's killed the wrong guy. The stupidest part of this scene doesn't become apparent until the credits roll, when we see that "Loser #2" and "Clone of Loser #2" were played by brothers, i.e. they did actually have twins doing this twin schtick, but filmed it as if it were one guy playing both parts. This marvelous technique also was applied to the aliens. Right before the clone reveals the horrible "twist" ending, we see an endless procession of the same two shots of the two alien puppets standing there twitching, after about five repeats of which Loser #1 exclaims "There's too many of them!" Somehow, we were apparently supposed to realize that we were meant to be seeing a new alien each time, even though they keep appearing in the same two spots over and over. Was it that much trouble to just pick them up and stick them in the ground in front of a different clump of bushes? Are there some obscure labor laws that apply to green spray-painted drumsticks of garbage that had to be respected, or are the Polonia brothers really the laziest and most incompetent filmmakers alive? Myself, I'm going with B. The truth be told, Feeders probably still isn't the worst film ever made, if for no other reason than the fact that these guys were making films for almost a decade before this. But it is probably the worst film you possess a chance in hell of ever actually seeing. Be thankful of this. Be very, very thankful. Of course, if you feel inspired to best Feeders at its own game, the next time you feel sick, just try ralphing into an empty cassette case and then trundling down to Blockbuster to tell them that you're an independent filmmaker with a personal vision. They apparently fell for it at least once. If you've seen this film and want to laugh even harder, check this out. It's an article by the director of this piece of wondrous crap that contains more undeserved self-praise than I've ever seen in one place. There is, by the way, a Feeders II. It involves Santa Claus. -review by Matt Murray If you like this title, we also recommend... |
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