This is an updated version of a review that was originally published in Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey.
When you watch a film by Mark and John Polonia, you understand immediately that they need to make movies in order to survive. Filmmaking is not just a hobby they entertain over a weekend or squeeze in after the kids go to bed. For the Polonia Brothers, creating films is a necessity like food, water, and shelter. Without it, they’d suffer. They’d be incomplete. There’s a consuming, hungry energy that drives every single one of their films. You can feel it in in their homemade effects and ambitious plotlines. You can taste it in the gallons upon gallons of red corn syrup. But what exactly makes a Polonia Brothers’ movie feel like a Polonia Brothers’ movie? Maybe it’s the accents? Or the mustaches? Or the tube socks? Definitely the tube socks.
What binds all their films together is the feeling of urgency — the need to make this movie and they need to make it right now, or else. Everything seems rushed; details are overlooked or ignored. There are giant plot holes, flubbed lines, distorted sound, and stills that stand in for exterior shots. There is no painstaking storytelling or the slow-burn of suspense or layered character development. Each movie feels like it is created in the moment by the seat of their pants, and when things go wrong, they just adapt and plow forward without looking back. No regrets, only a lot of ingenuity and shortcuts. Minor details like plot are deemed unimportant for the greater good of completing a film and sharing it with the world. So, what you get is a glorious explosion of joy and fun.
It’s like how when you’re a kid and your best friends race over to your house bursting with good news. And they’re so excited that they just can’t get their words out. They sputter and stutter and hedge. They wave their hands around. Everything out of their mouth is a string of nonsense and exclamation points. Every fiber, every cell of their body is electrified, and you can feel it. It is the purest feeling of exhilaration and wonder, and their brain just can’t seem to communicate anything clearly. But still, you understand. You listen and piece the story together. And then you get excited because your friends’ energy is so infectious. That’s the Polonia Brothers. They’ve arrived at your door, overcome with excitement. They’re out-of-breath and gulping for air, and they’re trying to tell you the greatest, most unbelievable story ever, but they’re also talking over each other and finishing each other’s sentences because they’re twins. So you just lean in and listen.
And then you say, “HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.”
And then your mom yells at you for swearing. But whatever. John and Mark tell you about how aliens are running through the forest and eating people.
“HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.”
Feeders begins with a simple question about aliens:” “Where do these creatures come from? Are they friends?” The answer to the first question is easy: Space. The answer to the second question is also easy: No.
It’s July 10, 6:45 a.m. A UFO has zipped across the sky and landed somewhere in a forest. Two aliens emerge. They’re small, scrawny creatures with stick-thin arms and the tiniest, daintiest hands. They have large heads and giant eyes and they look like puppets because they are puppets. They are exactly what you’d find in gift shop in Roswell, New Mexico, only these were found in a Target somewhere in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile Bennett (John Polonia, mustache) and Derek (Jon McBride, no mustache) are driving around in a red convertible on a cross-country road trip.
Now it’s 9:22 a.m. A forest ranger is looking for what he thought was a meteor but is actually aliens. They Taser him. They eat him. They are Feeders and this is the moment where the title of the movie makes sense. Now another man is going fishing. He wears a hat that says “Haven’t had a bite all day!” But he actually does get a bite . . . taken out of him. He cries, “Little men! Little men!”
Now it’s 3:40 p.m. A local doctor hears noises from the dead body in Examination Room #1. I think you know how this ends, which is to say Feeders eating a hole through someone’s abdomen.
Now it’s 5:22 p.m. Bennett is walking through the forest. In any other movie, this would be uninteresting. Fortunately, John Polonia is a magnetic beast in tube socks and all you want him to do is read you a story in his unmistakable Pennsylvanian accent.
The film escalates slowly, with constant timestamps: 7:38 p.m., 9:05 p.m., 3:35 a.m., 4:25 a.m. It dawned on me that these times might actually be accurate. Meaning that it’s possible Jon McBride and the Polonia Brothers shot a film over the course of 24 psychotic hours. You know what I did in the last 24 hours? I slept for eight of them and spent the rest of the time wondering what I was going to eat.
Feeders is a triumph, it really is. While it doesn’t have the gross-out mutilations of Hallucinations or the head-scratching, stop-motion chicanery of Saurians, Feeders still has the heart and spirit of the Polonia Brothers. There’s vehicular manslaughter, shots of bloody teeth, flying UFOs, and a pick-up of a cute girl at a gas station. The video effects are decidedly 8-bit and the alien puppets are second only to John Polonia’s swagger. Feeders is a genuine joy to experience. It has all the infectious energy and undeniable charm of your best friends telling you an incredible story using alien puppets and canned library music.
“We came here from many light years away for the simple reason for survival. Humans taste so good.”
