Bottom Feeder

The Details:
Directed By: Randy Daudlin
Tagline: Hunger Pains have a whole new meaning....
Country: Canada
Language: English
Color: Color

The Review:
Sometimes I wish I could take a movie, chop out the excess fat, burn my own version, erase the entire experience from memory and watch it all over again. Such is the case with Randy Daudlin's monster flick Bottom Feeder.

This almost-good creature feature begins with the story of a famous geneticist hired by a billionaire burn victim to develop a serum to regenerate dying cells. The geneticist ends up producing more theories than results, and gets an overdose of his own medicine forced into his jugular. He is thrown into the cellar of an old hospital and left to survive off nothing but rats. The side effects of his overdose make him acquire the genetic traits of his food and he begins mutating into a rather lame and not very scary looking Rat-Man.

A city maintenance crew happens to be scheduled to work in that very cellar, and needless to say, it ends up being more than just another day on the job!


Along the way we are also introduced to a sub-plot involving a couple government agents...or what SEEM to be government agents, one of which I could swear is Gillian Anderson's long lost twin sister!

To make it even freakier, the actresses name is Wendy Anderson, though from my research there is absolutely no relation to Gillian. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm, oh well.

All the ingredients are there for a cheesy good time. In fact, Bottom Feeder actually provides quite a bit of bloody entertainment and so-bad-it's-good-dialogue. The problem is, it takes nearly 45 or 50 minutes for it to realize it's a campy B-Horror movie and not a serious big budget production. Such is the downfall of so many of the direct to DVD horror movies flooding our video stores these days. That said, Bottom Feeder is still one of the better films of this crop.

To illustrate this point, I will put the first half of Bottom Feeder to the side for a moment and focus on all the positive aspects that come later on. For example, Tom Sizemore's character Vince Stoker has quite a few absurdly macho one liners that add some very beneficial laughs to break up the monstrous monotony. He even goes on a wonderfully typical tirade about how he spent two year's in 'Nam! Another particularly great laugh comes from Stoker's niece Sam talking to one of the other maintenance workers named Otis. There is also a smidgen of decent gore in the second half, with scenes involving hedge trimmers, arms, axes, Rat-Man's claws and one characters jawbone...yes, jawbone!!! These are really the type of moments that make this job worth while.

Besides all this, I'm not sure if I can really recommend Bottom Feeder. The first half is just mind-numbingly bland, and I'm not sure if the goodness to follow is quite good enough to justify sitting through everything else. About the only good part of the first 45 minutes is the very beginning of the credit sequence. Who really thought this would be a good idea? Who knows, but I'm glad they did...for it sure gave me a laugh!

So rent it if you wish, but don't say I told you to!



CHEESY LAUGHS: As long as you can wait for them.
HEDGE-TRIMMER: Yummy.
JAWBONE: Even yummier.