Not exactly the best named horror movie, but it does feature a slumming Tom Sizemore. However, it can’t overcome the silly premise and bad monster makeup.
Charles Deaver (Charles Fitzpatrick) is a rich guy that has been burned in a car accident. Scientist Nathaniel Leech (James Binkley) meets him and his goons in an abandoned warehouse to show Deaver his experimental drug. It seems that the drug could possibly repair the damage done to the millionaire’s features. However who wants to be a guinea pig when you’re rich so he has his henchlady Krendal (Wendy Anderson) to shoot Leech in the kneecaps, injects him with the glowing serum (looking like Re-Animator juice, which is never a good thing), and locks him in the tunnels beneath the facility.
The plan is to return and see if the serum heals Leech’s wounds. However, they forget an important element. The serum makes you ravenously hungry and you have to ingest some sort of processed protein and Krendal forgets to put it in the tunnel with him. If you feast on anything but the protein, it screws you up and you mutate. All to eat in the tunnels are rats and other vermin so you can imagine how messed up Leech gets. Meanwhile, Vince (Tom Sizemore) and his maintenance crew are prowling the tunnels to enrich themselves by finding a locked room they think might contain valuables. What they find in the tunnels is a killer beast who only values them as food.
I don’t know that Bottom Feeder was exactly the greatest title in the world since it’s easy to say that the movie is the bottom of the barrel. Well, not really it’s better than anything Ulli Lommel has done. At least it can entertain if it strikes you in the right mood. It’s a bit over the top.
The villain speaks in a hissing whisper and has the prerequisite scarred visage for such comic book villainy. Tom Sizemore also seems to have fallen from grace after all his law troubles and now finds himself relegated to low budget horror. The makeup for the creature really looked bad to me.
After Leech feasts on rats and a dog he starts to take on their characteristics (the cover has him looking rather canine) but I thought it looked more silly than scary. The oversized claws are obviously rubber, although some may think this fits in with the silly aspects of the story but it really bugged me.
It could entertain you if it strikes you in the right mood or are one for low budget creature features, but it didn’t do much for me. The “unrated” moniker is plastered on the front of the case, but I really didn’t see too much that made me think that it wouldn’t garner an R-rating if it was submitted to the MPAA.
Bottom Feeder is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features include a 28 minute making of featurette, theatrical trailers, and trailers of other horror flicks.
Though it might entertain in a low budget sort of way, this critic thought that it wasn’t the worst horror flick that he’d watched but it certainly wasn’t the best. An okay rental if the mood strikes you.
Bottom Feeder is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
Your Talkback on this Story