FEED ME (2022)
3 stars.
Bingo Films. Out Now. Digital
Sadly Feed Me isn’t a sequel to Little Shop of Horrors (Feed Me, Seymour), but what it actually is is hard to pin down as it is tonally all over the place. First and foremost, I guess, it’s a look at how far someone is prepared to go when grief stricken…
Jed Freeman (Christopher Mulvin) has recently lost his wife. Devastated, he spirals into a pit of depression and despair – suffering from nightmares, he thinks the only option is suicide. Then one night he meets the unhinged Lionel Flack (Neal Ward, in a suitably bonkers performance). Lionel has a proposal for him – invited back to his house, his new friend will help him end his life… but not quickly and painlessly. Because Jed’s new friend is a flesh eating cannibal and plans to slowly consume his new “meal ticket” in the most gruesome way possible. As things progress in grisly fashion Jed has visions of his dead wife Olivia (Samantha Loxley), often exhibiting the same wounds as he is. That’s really all there is to it – cannibal carnage in a rundown, filthy house.
There is much to admire here, and this has garnered many favourable reviews, though I have to admit I am not sure quite why. Granted it is well acted, with Mulvin committed in his role as the sad and desperate husband and Ward giving an off the wall, mad eyed, display of lunacy and it has well executed, bloody practical effects but overall it never seems to settle into a groove – is it a straight ahead horror, a dark comedy, a meditation on how grief can make people do things they wouldn’t otherwise consider? It’s all of these things but tonally it is never clear what it is trying to be and it never comes across as even remotely believable which tends to undercut it’s effectiveness.
The film was written and directed by Adam Leader and Richard Oakes, who made the similarly horrific but much more successfully realised Hosts in 2020.
Steve Kirkham
