Al's Birthday Review: Feeders 3

It's Al's Birthday again, so I, Bob, must suffer. This year's horrific abuse of friendship?

Feeders 3? Aw, crap.

Feeders 3: The Final Meal is the conclusion to what was, apparently, a trilogy of movies despite the first and second films being made in the mid-1990s and the third in 2022. It's a bit of a stretch. So is calling any of these things "films," honestly.

Okay. Long story short: Feeders is a story, to use the term loosely, of friends Derek and Bennett discovering an alien invasion, and of aliens killing and eating people. Feeders 2: Slay Bells is the story of family dad Alan (and Santa Claus) discovering and fighting an alien invasion at Christmas, and is also to a significant degree just stock footage from Feeders.

This comes minutes into the film, and sadly, is a lie.

So, after a twenty year break, the series is back in a new film that absolutely no one asked for. The story this time? The murders from the first film are still unsolved, Alan's son is making a film about the murders blaming it all on aliens, a nearly retired FBI agent is investigating, and the Feeders are about to return after being away for unspecified reasons. Meanwhile, Derek is in a mental hospital and Alan is catatonic in a wheelchair.

You might think, by that description, that this film has a plot. You would be wrong. What it has is a series of stunningly poorly connected scenes in which characters largely talk about the events of Feeders and Feeders 2 in lieu of actually doing anything new, and then, about 30 minutes after your soul has exited your body due to sheer boredom, largely get killed off by the titular Feeders in extremely dull, poorly shot attack scenes that serve only to prove that the alien puppets and puppetry are just as bad as they were in the first two films. But don't worry, there has been a change: the blood and gore effects have somehow become worse.

Seriously, though. Nothing, absolutely nothing, of any consequence happens in this movie for about the first 30-40 minutes. We meet no characters who are actually doing anything that matters. We spend a lot of time with the film crew making the movie, a reporter reporting on Halloween and the making of the movie, a scientist studying a supposedly dead Feeder, a doctor treating Derek at the mental hospital, and the FBI Agent investigating the old crimes, but:

• The film crew just sits there doing random scenes that are basically just reshoots of stuff from the first Feeders film with girls instead of guys as the leads, and are just as poorly acted.
• The reporter is so pointless the film at one point actually forgets it is in the middle of her doing a report about the film and just carries on showing scenes with the film crew like the segment didn't start as clips from a news report.
• She also notes at one point that "astrologists" are confused about meteor showers, apparently mixing up astrology and astronomy the same way anyone might if they did zero research for their film and were an idiot.
• The scientist spends ages talking about Feeders, discovering the Feeder is alive, and feeding it potato chips, all while mumbling to himself in a highly questionable and mostly unintelligible accent, but doesn't make any kind of useful or interesting discovery. It's all just meaningless babble that goes nowhere.
• The doctor treating Derek just ignores his warnings for most of the movie.
• The FBI agent's investigation consists entirely of meeting with Derek once and declaring him guilty, then calling his boss to let him know Derek is guilty. Seriously. That's all he does.

Only two elements of the "plot" get any actual build: Derek has a hand wound from getting acid spit at him during the first film, and Alan shows vague reactions when he spots Feeders on the film set his son is running. But, again, Derek is locked up in an asylum and no one listens to him, and Alan is catatonic and no one pays attention to him, so the only two characters getting a remote amount of development are ignored by the rest of the movie.

Oh, also, I'm fairly certain the same actor plays the scientist, the director, and possibly Derek, though I can't be sure on the last because you barely ever see his face under the enormous, awful-looking gray wig they gave him.

But that only scratches the surface of just how bad this film is. Consider:

• They use a ton of stock footage in the first of the reporter segments as she talks about Halloween, about the meteors, and more. That exact same stock footage is used later in the film to show, say, kids going trick or treating, or the aliens arriving. So basically, the reporter reports on footage from the future.
• The reporter talks up the film-within-the-film and we hear statements from the director and cast, but in a later segment with the reporter, the director claims he's a longtime fan but is on the show for the first time, apparently having forgotten the earlier reporting on his movie.
• Much like Feeders 2, the film features a large amount of footage from Feeders (and Feeders 2, in this case). It isn't like half the movie like in Feeders 2, but it's still far too much.
• Horror movie show hosts feature multiple times in weird segments surrounding and interrupting the movie:
• The film opens with Mr. Lobo telling us that we've waited 20 years for the next installment and the producers accept no responsibility if the film is "less than subpar." He notes that we've already paid for our tickets so we should shut our blowholes and enjoy the ride. He tells us "they're not bad movies, just misunderstood." Listen, movie, the fact that you know you're a crappy movie does not make it all right to be a crappy movie.
• About halfway through, we get an intermission with horror hosts Marlena Midnight and Gore De Vol, the latter of whom explains to Millennials what an intermission was and how movie theaters make their money on overcharging for snacks.
• I've not seen any of these folks' actual shows but they all seem more talented than the people making the actual movie here. Maybe have them do it?

Unsubtle Criswell reference by the guy who plays Criswell in the remake of Plan 9. Yay.

Eventually the feeders do start killing people, including: 

• A random road worker.
• members of the film crew (whose deaths go largely unnoticed by the others despite it being like a 5 or 6 person crew).
• an adult stealing candy from another adult at Halloween (though the scene is played like an adult stealing from a kid or teen, kind of).
• a woman who somehow thinks the Feeders are children in costumes despite them being like a foot shorter than the shortest kid who would be capable of walking, much less walking alone, on Halloween.
• An on-scene reporter who is part of a running gag where he can't hear the news anchor talking to him.
• The scientist with the questionable accent.
• The FBI agent, who is attacked outdoors at the same hotel as the two stars of the film while they are outdoors using a hot tub, but somehow they don't hear it.
• Female Derek (i.e., the lady playing Derek in the film-within-a-film, who is only ever referred to by that name as far as I recall) while she takes a shower.
• Presumably Female Bennet, though that isn't actually shown, after she leaves the hot tub because she's feeling cold, leading me to believe this film was created by an alien who possesses environmental immunity and therefore has never learned what temperatures mean. She also runs right into the FBI agent as Feeders are eating him and they both do a perfectly awful job of falling down, which is something that's kind of hard to screw up.

Insert Hulk Hogan "it's not hot" gag here.

• A random couple who reference the series V for unknowable reasons.
• The reporter and other folks at the studio as the alien invasion goes from 0 to entire global collapse in about a tenth of a second.

Of these, the only ones that manage any kind of suspense are the deaths of the FBI agent and female Derek, which at least do manage the most basic of horror movie setups and build a little tension. The rest are either dull jokes or boring exercises in predictability, or both.

There's literally too much stupid in this movie to go over all of it, so I'll just skip to the ending. Spoilers ahead if for some reason you actually give a crap about spoilers for Feeders 3, and if you do, God help you.

Why does a mental hospital have a random collection of national flags on a shelf?

So, we've offed most of the main characters, in as much as this movie has main characters, so we're left basically with two pairings: Derek and the doctor, and the director and his dad Alan.

The doctor hears the reporter's last broadcast and finally believes Derek, so she goes to see him, and he announces that he's figured out why he was left alive: because the aliens actually implanted aliens in him. I can only assume that no one's done, you know, an x-ray on him in the past 20 years, because that definitely seems like it would've shown up and proved his story. He dies via chestburster and the doctor flees.

Meanwhile, the director is feeding his catatonic dad when his dad sees feeders approaching and manages to warn his son. They get surrounded anyway and for some reason the movie throws in some subtitles as the aliens talk to each other, revealing they're two different groups that just decide to work together immediately anyway. That was pointless. Suddenly, Santa Claus shows up with a ray gun like he did in Feeders 2, but equally suddenly, dear old dad calls out to a UFO to kill Santa, so Santa gets blasted with a death ray and dies.

Dear old dad reveals the truth: He is, in fact, himself an alien agent. It's basically just an in-joke poking at what prior reviewers have noted about the franchise: this same guy, Mark Polonia, played the evil version of Bennett (not the good one, that was John Polonia apparently) in Feeders and also played Alan, the dad, in Feeders 2 and Feeders 3. Thus, Feeders 3 tries to mold all this together by claiming that evil Bennett was Alan - he came to observe and report, started a family, got attacked by a different group of feeders who didn't know who he was, got abducted by yet more feeders, returned catatonic, and has only just remembered who he was and now can apparently command both groups of feeders on Earth because this movie is incredibly stupid.

He reaches out to the director and quotes Vader's "rule the galaxy as father and son" line word for word except for switching "galaxy" for "earth." The doctor shows up too and adds, "and daughter," because she is apparently Alan's daughter even though that renders basically all of her reactions in all of her prior scenes completely nonsensical, and Alan and his alien son and daughter walk off into the light as Alan tells no one in particular they have a choice: "Join us and feed us, or pursue the present course and feed us anyway."

More feeder ships arrive, end credits, and Marlena wakes up post-credits after having fallen asleep, evidently from boredom.

Words cannot express how crappy Feeders 3 truly is. I would say that it must be seen to be believed, but that might encourage you to see it, which I do not recommend. The Astro-Zombies films actually have more developed plots than this, and I've ranted at Al for hours about how poorly plotted and nonsensical those films are when he's forced me to watch them. This was dangerously close to Actium Maximus-level bad, saved from that only by the dialogue actually generally being audible and intelligible.

Absolutely awful film. Happy Birthday, Al - the best birthday gift you could get is the knowledge that you have not watched Feeders 3.