Mutación diabólica

I watched this movie a while back and when it came to an end I was puzzled. Usually, I have a pretty strong reaction to a movie: I know if I've liked it or not, or if I've been bored with it, or if I've been bothered by it. I know something about my reaction to it. When I watched this a while back, I had - honestly - no reaction. I didn't know if I had liked it or not. So it faded into the distant past and I moved on, until the opportunity came up to watch it again. I decided to watch it again. Sometimes a movie that doesn't really strike a chord with you will do so on a second viewing. So I watched it again. And I have exactly the same reaction - I'm not really sure if I liked it or not.

It's a schlocky monster story, where a scientist invents some sort of cure for a disease that a multi-millionaire wants, but he forces the scientist to try it out first - with really bad results. The mutated scientist then encounters a maintenance crew in underground tunnels where he was forced to try the cure, there's a lot of blood and gore and death. What else is there? Really - not much.

It wasn't horrible. I'll say that. It's a basic, run of the mill monster story - and those can be OK as time wasters. Aside from Tom Sizemore, who played the head of the maintenance crew, the cast was pretty anonymous. And, as far as Vince (played by Sizemore) was concerned - how in the world could he have been a POW in Vietnam? Sizemore is nowhere near old enough to play a guy who would have been a POW in Vietnam. That grated on me a bit, even though it's a throwaway part of the story.

I guess I'll give it a 5. Right in the middle. Because I honestly don't know if I liked it or not.

It's amazing to me that Tom Sizemore has been in two of the best movies in recent history and then ends up being in crap like this. (Heat, Saving Private Ryan)

But this movie, is not very good at all. Reminds me of Mimic , underground tunnel thing going on, but no where near as good. 3/10

I guess they could have shown something far worse than this, and for that I'll give it an extra credit. But bare in mind, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to watch Bottom Feeder.

So, if you're into creature movies, look elsewhere, if you're into low budgets, or indie projects, again, nothing to see here, try elsewhere, you are bound to find something, anything, better than this.

But if you do decide to play it, just lower your expectations, as much as you can, and watch it at your own peril. Some moments you will have to question your decision, others, perhaps acknowledge that you did a bad thing and probably there is no way out. I mean if you do get halfway, I guess there is nothing more to do but endure.

Cheers!

Working on a clean-up crew, several workers are assigned to a new job at an abandoned medical testing lab and after going through the facility are ambushed by a large creature living in the tunnels from a chemical drug that turned it huge and feral and set out to get away from the creature.

There was some good stuff to this one when it got around to it. One of the better aspects is the film's incredibly creepy location, as the fact that they're in a sewer-system is a big plus. The building they use to access them is already quite creepy, but it looks really great here due to this one effectively looking like an abandoned building should've been, with the appropriate amount of decay present with the other little things that would be found in a sewer to begin with but simply rotted away due to time, which is a very nice touch. That it's also dark most of the time seems to work well for this one, meaning that it's just an incredibly suspenseful location and mixed with the corridor of tunnels down there and the overall look to it, this one comes out rather nicely. There's also a nice bonus here in that, although it deals with a giant rat, it's not created in the traditional sense and instead is brought about through the chemical tests turning the individual into a monstrous creature and is much better than having a gigantic swarm of rats doing the killing. The confrontations with it are even better, as the encounters down in the creepy sewers provide a lot of fun times and generally seem highly enjoyable. The car-park one is one of the best ones, and the shootouts in the corridors work amazingly well at getting a lot of good action into this one. Even the surprise jumps from the creature attacking out of the shadows generate some fun, and the conclusion scores rather nicely before veering off. The last plus here is the film's incredibly high gore content, which gets bloody when it wants to. These here the film's good points. There were a couple of problems with this one. One of the biggest ones is that the film doesn't have a whole lot going for it during the beginning part. It's just far too long and not all that entirely interesting when it presents its opening, going from the run-down with the chemical to the meeting between the two parties and the aftermath of that to getting into talking about the mission from the crew, it takes about thirty minutes before even going down into the sewers. Since the rat isn't the first thing done down there either, there's not a whole lot of interesting things going on through these parts of the film, and it just makes these parts of the film drag on for some time before it gets really good. Another problem is that there's not a whole lot of clarity when it comes to dealing with the creature's attacks. Most of them are either over so quick it's hard to tell what happened until the aftermath, too dark to render anything visible, edited so haphazardly it's impossible to see anything or a combination of them, and a few suffer from all those factors which are unfortunate as they were set-up to be among the better scenes until the flaws kicked in. The last flaw here is the film's incredibly stupid ending, which has almost nothing right going for it and is just all-around bad, no matter how it's looked at. These here are the film's bad points.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

I have actually watched this 2007 movie once before, but I have to admit that I have entirely forgotten about the movie, aside from remembering the movie's cover, the title and the fact that it had Tom Sizemore in the leading role.

When I had the opportunity to revisit the movie here in 2025, I did so, as I couldn't remember the storyline in the movie. And I am a sucker for horror movies and creature features in general.

Writer and director Randy Daudlin put together a script that was rather generic for a creature feature. So yeah, there really isn't a particular reason why you should opt to sit down and watch "Bottom Feeder" when there are far better and more enjoyable creature features available. Sure, this 2007 movie was watchable, but it wasn't a memorable viewing experience by any means. And I suppose that is why the movie has vanished from my memory from the first time I watched it.

The acting performances in the movie were fair. I am not really a fan of Tom Sizemore, but he is an adequate enough actor from time to time. The movie also has Martin Roach on the cast list, which sums up the two only familiar faces on the cast ensemble for me.

Visually then you're not in for a grand horror experience. The creature design was simplistic, and it was obviously just a dude in a latex suit, and not a particularly good latex suit at that. But hey, there are way more lousy special effects in many other horror movies, so that at least counts for something that the effects in "Bottom Feeder" weren't rock bottom.

Watchable if you really have a craving for creature features and have 86 minutes to spare on a generic one. But otherwise this is not really a movie that I would recommend to the average horror fan.

My rating of writer and director Randy Daudlin's 2007 movie "Bottom Feeder" lands on a four out of ten stars.