the plot: While on vacation on a remote Canadian island, professional football player Morgan (Gortner) and his friends are attacked by a swarm of giant wasps and a huge, man-eating chicken. The wasps kill one of the men, but Morgan and the rest of the group escape. At a secluded farmhouse, Morgan meets Mrs. Skinner (Lupino), a fervently religious woman who believes there’s nothing strange about giant bugs and chickens and refuses Morgan’s pleas for help. The football player and his crew make it off the island but later decide to return in order to discover the cause of the bizarre mutations. While on the island, they meet Jack Bensington (Meeker) and his assistant, Lorna (Franklin). Bensington learns that Mrs. Skinner has been feeding her animals a milky-white, gooey substance she calls “the food of the gods.” The substance—which bubbles up from a potentially contaminated well on the island—is the source of the mutations, and while Bensington wants to bottle the stuff and bring it back to the mainland, Lorna has reservations. All the petty squabbling is temporarily set aside, though, when swarms of giant rats begin attacking all the humans on the island. As Morgan, Lorna and the other stranded travelers try to fend off the monstrous rats and oversized bugs, Bensington tries to figure out how he can profit from the island’s abominable animals.

why it’s good: Most nature-revenge horror movies manage to impart some lazy environmental message while being terribly inept and remarkably gory, and “Food of the Gods” is no exception. The unlucky homo sapiens in “Food” are massacred by angry wasps, chewed by giant chickens and munched by man-eating maggots. The lesson here, of course, is that nature is pissed off, but exactly what humankind did in “Food” to earn nature’s wrath is unclear. Surely, feeding farm animals an unknown goo is not the best idea, but who can blame Ida Lupino for offering her chickens something that seems to spring forth from the ground? “Food” is fun, though, if only for the goofy special effects—which largely consist of cute looking rats frolicking on miniature houses and tiny motor homes. Though the movie could have been aided by a more charismatic cast or interesting characters, Gortner, Lupino and the rest of the actors do what they can, and one can really only demonstrate so much range when punching a giant chicken right in the beak. Despite all the doofy effects and lapses in logic (is flooding an island ever really a good escape tactic?), the climax to “Food” is compelling, in a mildly competent sort of way. And although the movie’s final shot—of a wide-eyed moppet drinking milk from a cow that ate “the food of the gods”—is ridiculous, it’s also sort of predictive of future generations of school kids turned mutants thanks to growth hormones in our food. Or maybe it’s not—“Food” does, after all, feature Ida Lupino fighting a man-eating rat with a meat-cleaver, so its powers of prognostication are dubious at best.

why you should own it: “The Food of the Gods” is worth a rent if you’re in the mood to watch a man in a giant chicken suit pick a fight with someone. Fittingly, it’s part of MGM’s “Midnight Movies” collection, but sadly does not boast any special features.