FOOD OF THE GODS (HOLLYWOOD THRILLER)

Directed By Bert I Gordon, Produced by Samuel J Arkoff & Bert I Gordon, Starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker and Jon Cypher. Music by Elliot.

Storyline: Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) a football player goes on a holiday along with his friends to an island. There, one of his friends gets attacked and killed by giant wasps in the thick of the forest while they were horse-riding. This upsets Morgan. Though he leaves the island immediately, he returns to the island after some days with arms and ammunition to kill the giant wasps along with his friend. But he finds that apart from the wasps there are other creatures like giant caterpillars and rats which have grown to huge sizes due to consumption of a particular food called Food of The Gods which seems to be oozing out of the earth somewhere in the island. He tries to eliminate the rats by shooting them down but their number is too huge to accomplish the task. Ultimately, he breaks open a nearby dam to flood the area full with water and all the huge rats drown in that water since they will be unable to swim due to their huge sizes. But the food powder gets into the nearby fields, which is consumed by some cattle which in turn get into children through their milk. The movie ends here, probably to be continued in a sequel.

Positives: Anyone who missed how a Hollywood movie used to be in the 1970s can watch this movie to admire their movie taking skills way back, with the lesser technology available at that time. It was well taken and the location used (Cowan’s island in British Columbia) was the right spot to shoot the movie. Music played a very important role in projecting the movie to a ‘horror’ level, rather than adventure led.

Negatives: The movie, though based on H G Wells’ novel, The Food of the Gods, was not the exact replica. The story was totally manipulated to suit an entertainment based movie, instead of the actual subject in the book. Lack of computer aided screenplay and cinematography could never bring about the real big size of the creatures to appear real.

My rating is 3 out of 5.

Note: Please refer my earlier review on the classical book by H G Wells