Bottom Feeder is a low budget monster movie starring Tom Sizemore (Natural Born Killers, Dreamcatcher). The premise of the story is simple, yet fairly solid. After sustaining crippling burns in an automobile accident, millionaire Charles Deaver (Charles Fitzpatrick) hires a geneticist to develop a drug that will regenerate body tissue. Doctor Nathaniel Leech (James Binkley) manages to create the miracle drug, but not without some adverse side-effects. A synthesized protein is required to neutralize the savage hunger that accompanies the drug. Deaver decides to test the drug, not on himself, but on Dr. Leech. He has his thugs beat up the poor doctor and shoot him in the chest. They administer the newly developed drug and lock him in some abandoned underground tunnels, with the intent of returning in a day to see if the drug works. Without the protien neutralizer, Dr. Leech is left scavenging on rats and a stray dog to quell his hunger. After he ingests the vermin, he mutates into a rat-like dog-beast.
Sizemore plays a blue-collar city maintenance worker who earns extra cash by looting old medical equipment. He convinces his crew to follow him to an abandoned facility, under the false pretense that the tunnels below it need to be cleaned. There, they come face-to-face with the monster (and Deaver’s evil cohorts) and suddenly it becomes a fight for survival.
Bottom Feeder comes equipped with all the hallmarks of a B-grade monster movie: cheesy dialogue, poor acting, one-dimensional characters, and multiple plot holes. Many times, the quality of a B-grade monster movie lies in the quality of the monster makeup. In Bottom Feeder, the monster makeup wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen, but it certainly wasn’t the worst either. The monster essentially looked like some dude in a monster suit, and the feet in particular (which were shown far too often) were rather unconvincing. However, the creature was drenched in blood and slime for most of the movie, which gave it a more threatening appearance.
What really hurt the film from a monster movie standpoint was the fact that director Randy Daudlin didn’t even bother to try and make the film the least bit scary or suspenseful. Indeed, there are no scenes with any build-up or tension or suspense, and there were few, if any, “jump in your seat” scares. Rather, the creature simply plods along in brightly lit tunnels telegraphing his attacks with a vicious growl.
Nonetheless, I found the film to have a certain amount of “bad movie” entertainment value. The action is somewhat slow to get started, but the second act is filled with a fair amount of blood, guts, and gore.
There are plenty of other monster movies out there that are better than Bottom Feeder, but as for B-grade monster movies go, there are plenty of worse ones too.
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