Sweat, Bs

One of the Boing Boing posts I got excited about yesterday was Xeni Jardin’s note about her Fancast review of Food of the Gods. I love B horror movies, and I haven’t seen nearly enough of them. Hulu‘s helped with that, as has Archive.org, but I’m thrilled to find another source, and this looked like it was right up my alley.

I told NovySan, “I’m going to work out and watch bad sci-fi.”

And I did. And oh, man, was it good.

This movie’s got everything. A heroic football player who’s attacked by a giant rooster. Ida Lupino as a meek (and in some scenes, apparently brain-damaged) farm wife. Flesh-eating larvae. Cultural commentary, in the form of a plucky female bacteriologist (though why, exactly, a bacteriologist is needed to evaluate a possible source of animal feed is never fully explained) and a pregnant hippie chick who’s refusing to marry the father of her baby (and who, remarkably, doesn’t die for it!). It’s also got great special effects (okay, the giant wasps, not so much – but the optical and miniature work on the flood is excellent), surprisingly high production values, and much better acting than you might expect.

That’s not to say it’s immune to the hallmarks of B-grade filmmaking – breathtakingly bad decisions (“No, leave the closed car here; we’ll take this open Jeep and explore the island”); failure to notice the most obvious clues (“I wonder what happened to Mr. Skinner?” You mean you didn’t notice the blood-soaked Volkswagen on your way to the farm?); animal cruelty as a shortcut to realism (there’s at least one obviously dead, drowned rat in a shot near the end; one of the commenters on Fancast noted that the scenes of giant rats being shot are, in fact, scenes of real rats being shot, presumably with BB guns); and one of the clumsiest set-ups for a sequel I’ve ever seen. I also had several opportunities to reflect, while I rowed and later worked my legs and abs, that allowing the hero character to do the voiceover dilutes the drama, because obviously the person doing the voiceover isn’t going to die. (Unless, of course, he’s dead already, or you suspect the director of being clever and/or cruel enough to defy your expectations and let the voiceover character die, taking his voice with him. See American Beauty for the former, Australia for the latter (but in the case of Australia, keep in mind that I’m a sucker for an epic, and probably more than usually susceptible as a result).)

And now, given my Santa Monica food adventure earlier today, I’m going to hit the NordicTrack and work my upper body. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to watch while I do it.*

*Update: Yes, I have. I’m going to watch The Oblong Box, because I’m in love with Vincent Price, and with Edgar Allan Poe, and with Christopher Lee, and it’s got an awesome title, too.**

**Update to the Update: Unfortunately, the Fancast video was just too glitchy – I argued with it for awhile, then gave up and loaded up a Pandora station. This morning, though, I discovered that the movie is also available as an instant download on Netflix – in a double-feature with Scream and Scream Again, no less!*** So I’m watching it (in Firefox, thanks to IE Tab) while I work. (And for that, I thank DeskPins, which lets me run it in a window set to stay always-on-top.)

***And an update to the Update to the Update: Scream and Scream Again isn’t an instant download yet. Darn.