Review: Feeders (1996)
Directed by: John Polonia, Mark Polonia, Jon McBride
Starring: Jon McBride, John Polonia, Todd Carpenter
Written by: Mark Polonia
Country: United States
Not available on physical media
IMDb
Feeders, a ultra-low-budget alien invasion magnum opus from SOV royalty John and Mark Polonia, was released just a week after Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day and somehow found a pretty big audience, a large portion of which was probably buffoons who thought they were going to be watching Will Smith punch aliens in their asshole alien faces. Massive video store chain Blockbuster Video picked up this title and widely distributed it in the hopes easily swindled buffoons would be easily swindled. And they were!
And while your expectations going into Feeders should be absurdly low based on its papier-mâché aliens, clear disinterest in acting of any sort, visual effects straight out of a dilapidated Macintosh Classic, and emaciated story, it’s fairly enjoyable — mostly due to the abominable qualities listed previously, brought to meager life with unparalleled passion. After a crudely but charmingly hand-drawn introduction that provides a cursory pondering of malevolent life beyond earth’s boundaries, the Polonias get right down to it: aliens have landed on earth and they’re eating people, despite having no apparent teeth and mouths much too small for their carnivorous pursuits. But it’s happening nonetheless and it’s up to John Polonia’s glasses and mustache and Jon McBride’s mullet and immense eyeballs to stop it.
Since this was made by the same twins that concocted an ultra gore-fest like Splatter Farm and a nightmarish brain-plague like Hallucinations, you would be forgiven for anticipating something equally gnarly and trippy with Feeders. But it’s docile stuff other than a mind-curdlingly terrible beheading and some gray matter oozing from an E.T.-ravaged skull. The Polonias forego truly psychedlic apocalyptica in favor of some generic and overused inverted coloring. But true to form, John and Mark do take the audience on a lo-fi adventure through a variety of messy, box-strewn houses in which “actors” who may not have ever conversed with another human being attempt to hold conversations based on cue cards just off screen. These awkward talks are occasionally interrupted by a “puppeteer” heaving one of the alien puppets at an actor’s head, likely without warning. There’s a fun library score of knock-off X-Files spookytunes to keep things eerie. Occasionally, pixelated UFOs vroom across the frame and spew light. Towards the film’s finale, things get slightly more artful and clever (including one of the more ingenious ways the brothers have leveraged their genetic similarities), but it’s come perhaps too late.
Though the DIY Polonia hustle is present and accounted for, they’re working with scant raw material, leading to a film that feels super long at only 69 minutes that never ratchets the lunacy beyond “kind of tickled.”
Overall rating: 5.5 out of 10
