The Food Of The Gods (1976)
This was one of those movies I saw at the drive-in as a kid and was scared of large rats coming to get me for... well for a while. It scared me a bit (and there were very few things that did) but somehow the thought of rodents gnawing on you got to me so I decided to watch it again with adult eyes... and laughed my butt off.
This movie is a heavy-handed 'man has raped the land, the land will get revenge' kind of movie, H. G. Wells was good at that, but after a speech at the beginning we get into one of the silliest movies trying to be gory and scary and ending up being way too much fun to pick apart. And all that language and 'gore' with a PG rating! How in the hell did they get away with that? We start with Morgan (an unfortunately named Marjoe Gortner) who apparently is the 70's version of MacGyver because he knows everything about everything and nothing ever ruffles his feathers. In other words, he's extremely annoying. 
He's hunting deer with dogs on an island (everything takes place in Canada so it's always wet and/or foggy) when a friend gets separated from the other two and is found dead - swollen. We get to see why - the cheesiest fake wasps that yes, I know it's the 70's, but the laughs began and didn't end until the credits. He finds a cabin that can magically change shape (I'll show you in a minute) but the woman, Mrs. Skinner is none too nice to him and has no phone so after battling a huge rooster - well, a huge rooster HEAD anyway, they didn't have funds for the rest of it, he hauls his buddy's body back to the mainland. Ewww.
All the animals (well, the babies anyway) have fed from a mysterious small spring coming from the ground which Mr. Skinner, whose land it's on calls The Food Of The Gods. I call it gross looking cottage cheese gone bad. He plans on selling it to the highest bidder but begins to have a crisis of conscience so comes back home. He's driving this red VW bug and the fun begins... He blows a tire and hears a noise and AHHH huge rats are after him! Now as I said it's always either raining or foggy and this is no exception - everything is soaked. Except the rats. Perfectly dry rats are seen crawling over a badly made wet VW model - different than the real car. Then a rat puts his head through the windshield like it was paper. Still dry though.
These kinds of inconsistencies are rampant through the film, which is kind of like sci fi slapstick. There's just too much to make fun of to keep this review to a decent length. Like how they use the same footage of these miraculously dry rats in the rain moving the same piece of ground like a Hanna Barbera cartoon. That saved a bit of money on film I'll bet. By the time the rats are done with Mr. Skinner, there's a boot, an arm, and a pile of something that looked like pomegranate seeds. Oh, and fortunately although the velociRATors (yeah, I know what I said) knew to open the car door and rip it off as well as take out the windshield, they were kind enough to leave the windshield wipers intact.
Soon we have a real douchebag named Bensington coming to the cabin to buy the stuff from the Skinners. He zooms right past the red VW with all the carnage without even looking, and also a distressed couple in a broken RV. Nice guy. His assistant is a 'lady bacteriologist' (wow, how proactive) named Lorna (Pamela Franklin, in her last movie - I absolutely loved her in The Legend Of Hell House) who doesn't approve of him or his methods. She's very verbal about it too which is funny in itself - she's playing an American but her very English accent slips in and out through the movie. Love you though Pamela. As Morgan and his friend return to the island because, I don't know, he just doesn't know when to stay out of anything, they apparently also zoom past the VW and the carnage, although he does stop for the RV couple.
As all converge on the magic cabin the rats have begun to take over. They've killed the super huge chickens (not eating them though) and are swarming all over the place now, supposedly being led by an albino rat for some reason. One of the characters kind of gives their SFX secrets away saying the chickens could be simply 'plaster of paris and some ostrich feathers'. Shhhh... nobody's supposed to guess that except every single person watching this movie. Now MacGyver - uh I mean Morgan has tried different ways to keep them back, including shocking them with electricity and drowning them (I don't like rats but they better have been careful with those little guys). He and his friend also blast them with shotguns (you can plainly tell no injury happens to them - it looks like they hit them with little red paint BBs).
There's still a ton of them of course or we wouldn't still have a movie to get through. The inconsistencies keep coming and we kept laughing.. when Bensington looked at the miraculous spring it was calm as glass - a second later it was bubbling like a cauldron. And the changing cabin... wow. Morgan and his friend, in revenge mode I suppose, go out to explode the wasps (Hmm, a munitions expert too, huh?) they find a huge nest on a small limb, blow it up, go and look and there's not a scrap of anything plus it is a different tree. Wahahahaaaaa...
Okay, the RV chick is preggers and going into labor and the rats are closing in. Since MacGyver - sorry, Morgan has determined that these rats can't swim he's gonna drown all of them. This is where the magic cabin comes in handy. He makes a couple of pipe bombs and blows a small dam (That's pretty much illegal, right?) and the water is pasted in so badly most of the time it doesn't hit the ground. And it's partially transparent - kind of like the wasps. This water, even though the cabin is on a hill, manages to flood it up to the second level. But the magic cabin is ready for them - where there was once two windows and nothing else, there is now a veranda and two chimneys, so they can stand and watch the nasty furries all drown. The white rat, smarter than your average bear, gets on the roof but Morgan shoots it and it falls into the water. In the end, you don't see a single rat floating anywhere. Where the hell did they all go?
The next scene the water is gone and for some lame reason they're dragging all the dead rats up to the porch to set them on fire. Where the hell did the water go and why make a bonfire by the house? Oh, and the magic cabin has reverted to it's former state of two windows and no veranda. Phew. And because H. G. Wells was trying to teach mankind a lesson we get our little twist - everything washes out to the rivers, lakes, what have you - including the last of the bad cottage cheese looking food of the gods. Which the cows drink. Then give milk. Then schoolchildren drink it up. Oh good, more Nephilim (look 'em up, they're in Genesis). And our lesson is over and the silliness makes me think I'll never be hesitant to pick up a rat ever again. Squeak.
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