FOOD OF THE GODS
No second helping for me

  Looking at the cover, you might think that the food of the gods is people, but you'd be wrong.  Unfortunately, it's a pina colada-like substance that bubbles up out of the ground and makes animals gigantic.

From Bert I. Gordon, who's basically a giant-animal-movie cottage industry unto himself, this concerns a football player who, after thinking to himself at length in voiceover about how his dad always kept going on about how nature is gonna get her revenge one day, is attacked by mosquitoes the size of, uh, footballs.  His friend is killed (a big proboscis right into the chest, you know that's gotta hurt), so he goes to a nearby farmhouse for help, where he's promptly attacked by a turkey the size of an allosaur.

"You've gotta be kidding me!" said I, to no one in particular because nobody else will watch these movies with me anymore.  No, I was indeed seeing a boxing match between a man with a white-guy afro and a giant turkey.  I would've liked to have seen more of this.  No, really.

"Based on a portion of a novel by H.G. Wells" boasts the opening credits, which is the first claim of its kind I can remember hearing (exactly which novel is this?).  Anyway, we're unfortunately denied further man-on-turkey action, since the real nature-runs-amok baddies of this movie are giant rats who make wildcat sounds.  Or, more specifically, normal rats climbing over tiny houses and campers, which aren't nearly as menacing, but they're so CUTE!

The effects here are, shall we say, less than convincing; it's basically like Night Of The Lepus with smaller ears, and giant killer bunny rabbits are conspicuous in their absence, as is DeForest Kelley, and I shouldn't have to say that Ralph Meeker is no DeForest Kelley.

Just not a lot to say here; if you like hokey-looking giant rat heads poking in from every corner of the screen to take a bite out of somebody, this one's for you.  I'm not always this demanding, but today, I'd rather have something with a little more substance.

I don't know how, but Food Of The Gods somehow managed to rack up enough public interest to justify a sequel 13 years later, which I haven't seen.  At least the British Columbian scenery is pretty, and there are a few chuckles for those who like to see rats get "blown away" by little squirts of red paint.  Rated the 18th greatest B-movie of all time by Maxim magazine, right between The Warriors and Walking Tall. 

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