The Polonia brothers represent one of the odder chapters in recent film history.
They started out back in the 80s, making movies for their own amusement, yet somehow managed to secure a VHS release for their film Splatter Farm in 1987.
However, their big break came nine years later when, in the wake of the success of Independence Day, Blockbuster Video picked up their film Feeders. It became Blockbuster’s number one Independent film rental for the year.
It was the sort of opportunity that only existed back in the early days of video rentals, when video stores didn’t just have fifty copies each of about twenty popular films, and they would have separate sections for such niche offerings as foreign, anime, independents or classics.
And Mark and John Polonia never stopped making movies, either: While John died in 2008, Mark is still hard at work after almost thirty years, still filling the videostores with such “epic” films as Sharkenstein.
They obviously love what they do, bringing a lot of enthusiasm into what are basically terrible films.
Naturally, they have a pretty good sized fan base. Naturally.
A couple of guys driving through the Polonia brother’s hometown of Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, make a date to meet a couple of girls at the State park (home of what is called the “Pennsylvania Grand Canyon”). However, the aliens are there already and they have their own idea what would make an interesting picnic lunch (in a word, us).
Mind you, when John Polonia talks to the girl they meet, if you’re watching closely, you’ll note that the two aren’t ever in the same shot. Not ever. And not only don’t the girls make it to the State park, but instead they end up in in a massive battle with the aliens (who devour people messily despite not having mouths) with no sign of our heroes anywhere. I suspect that they simply couldn’t get the girls there at the same time as the guys and edited around it. And, I might add, clumsily.
It would be easy to nitpick the entire film, spotting one mistake after another, but that misses the point: it’s all about making movies for the sheer love of it, even if your budget is less than the cost of Johnny Depp’s favorite shirt and no one in your cast can act his way out of the proverbial wet paper bag. It almost screams at us, “Let’s see YOU do any better.”
And if you can? Well, then, by all means send me a screener.
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7 thoughts on “Feeders (1996)”