Yipes! It’s a zombie plague! And it’s up to the Channel 5 News Team, coming to you live from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to tell it like it is and save the day! But the evil United States government will stop at nothing to keep the truth from coming out! It’s Armageddon for under twenty grand! It’s Feeding The Masses!

Imagine Romero’s Dawn of the Dead made on a fraction of the budget, with a fraction of the wit, satire, entertainment value, and zombie action, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect here. Don’t come looking for solid acting, sharp dialogue, quality special effects, exciting action sequences, intentional humor, adequate staging, good teeth, or any of the other frills afforded by modern cinema; it’s duct-tape-and-plywood time, and I’m surprised they managed to block off as many streets as they did. Nobody here is “graduating” to Hollywood. Ever. When the director describes this as a B-flick, he’s putting on airs.

The plot’s basic zombie stuff: a disease known as the Lazarus virus (get it? Lazarus? Ha! He came back from the dead!) that turns its victims into your basic flesh-eating zombies is spreading across the nation. Low-budget chaos reigns, martial law has been imposed, and the government is willing to do whatever it takes to keep it all quiet.

The action centers on Torch Tenney, Channel 5 cameraman and lava lamp enthusiast who’s been hardened by years spent filming the mean streets of Pawtucket. See, they call him Torch because he “burns so much film” (the master of Feeding The Masses, alas, not included). I guess he’s supposed to be the hero, but with his wild eyes, hippie stylings, and yellow Stonehenge grin, he seems more like that pot-reeking dude who’s way too old to be in Psych 201 you knew and loathed. (Indeed, the movie indulges in some clunky, dated dope humor wherein our intrepid douchebag jacks up a stoner-zombie for his weed, but I doubt even Jason Mewes would be amused). Torch, tough guy that he is, is thirsty for action. He’s tired of all the bullshit human interest stories the bosses insist on assigning him (but not so tired that he refrains from offering sleazy come-ons to his subjects), and he’s looking to get the real zombie scoop.

Unbeknownst to Torch, however, the feds have established a militarily-enforced media blackout and Channel 5 has been commandeered by Agent Barnes, a malevolent, Kennedy-like government liaison with bad skin and teeth like a game of 52-pickup. Barnes wants to tow the line, and he’s not about to let some punk-ass bitch like Torch fuck up the propagandizing. But Torch gives it the ol' college try anyway, enlisting the help of Sherry, a fat-armed, snaggle-toothed reporter who never lets her lisp get in the way of a good story, and Roger, a friendly soldier who helpfully exposits that he’s the military escort for the news team but loses all credibility when he alleges that Sherry has a great body.

Soon enough, the gang is on the road, running from the law and shooting illicit footage of cheap-looking second-unit mayhem. There are a few other characters that don’t really figure in. Some cipher tech-guy who was boring, the station head who’s apparently the only man in the world over 35 named Chad, and Fran, who was, like, the boss of the news team or something. She dies early, which is good, because she can’t act for shit.

Naturally, all this wackiness leads to a lot of contrived run-ins between GOVERNMENT and MEDIA (Agent Barnes to Chad the Station Head: “You’re supposed to be the opiate of the masses!” Meg: “…isn’t that religion?”) and all the shallow meditations that go with that sort of thing. The company line on Feeding The Masses is that it's loaded with subversiveness and satire, but all that really means is that we’re continually interrupted by annoying mock-commercials (though the “Party Bus” sure looks like a good time) and that all the politicians are assholes. The film never bothers explaining why the government would have an interest in keeping the populace in the dark about an widespread zombie epidemic, or how that would even be possible in a time when information flows so freely. Perhaps logic is a tall order on $20,000, but Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead is far more incisive in its depiction of government as lumbering and incompetent, as opposed to diabolically all-knowing and all-controlling. Compared to ‘Dawn’, Feeding The Masses comes across as a lot of paranoid ranting and conspiracy-theorizing with all the wisdom and insight of a Rage Against The Machine b-side. It certainly doesn’t help that much of its invective is wasted on untimely subjects like the Ebola virus and right-wing militias (all the more illogical considering the film’s ultimate message of self-reliance… like, it’s okay to have guns and stuff, just don’t be a hick about it). The film’s portrayal of the military doesn’t fare much better; soldier-boy Roger, previously the most likeable and capable character, takes a stupid hairpin-turn into obsessive madness (more on that in a minute), and all the other troops are either murderous brutes or borderline retarded. The fact that every soldier has sideburns and facial hair illustrates the extent of the filmmakers’ military knowledge.

The money shot: The Channel 5 news team’s highly professional, Swiss-watch dynamic is eventually disrupted by Roger’s perplexing lust for Sherry. You’re not going to watch the movie anyway, so I don’t mind spoiling this incredibly peculiar sequence: After being gently rebuffed by Sherry, Roger heads to an abandoned building, meets up with some shady biker procurer-type fellow, presents him with a metal attaché case presumably full of cash (or perhaps not, maybe he was just giving the guy a nice metal attaché case), and says something vaguely inquiring to make sure “she looks the part.” Now I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking the same thing: Our boy Roger’s looking to get some zombie tail. But you’re wrong. Instead, our burly biker friend leads Rog to a peep-show booth; the barrier slides up, the Casio beats come thumping, and a non-zombie facsimile of Sherry (complete with official Channel 5 dildo) comes out and starts stripping. So here’s Roger, enjoying himself (i.e., beating off), muttering hateful things about Sherry, and finally slamming a button that triggers the door behind the stripper, from which a zombie appears to promptly tear her throat out. Roger finishes his business and looks on as the biker gentleman enters the stripping chamber to noisily chainsaw them both to pieces.

The scene would’ve been even more disconcerting had the chainsaw actually been on. An expensive fetish, in any case.

It’s no surprise that Feeding The Masses steals shamelessly from far better, far more expensive movies: Idiosyncratic zombies straight out of the Romero films (I spied a referee zombie, a kilt zombie, and, nudge-nudge, gag-gag Evil-Dead t-shirt zombie - tucked in, of course), the militaristic drum-accompaniment that I hated in Aliens, the slow-motion “bad-ass” strut made popular by Reservoir Dogs and beaten to a pulp ever since, and a lunkheaded lift from Shaun of the Dead that finds Torch having to deal with his undead roommate (he ends up shooting him with a rusty revolver that looks like something the Cold Case Files posse fished out of the river). I’d normally applaud this sort of thing, but when a movie’s whole premise and all its themes have already been taken wholesale from a genre classic that’s been riffed on countless times, it’s hard to be forgiving.

Oh, and collectors of dusty 60s jargon, take note: just as soon as you’re finished giggling at the “you got your clock cleaned” line, another character busts in with “Chinese fire drill”.

The whole production is low-budget at its lowest, grade-Z through and through. Every expense has been spared. If you think Escape From L.A. had some bad CGI, brother, you haven’t seen Feeding The Masses. We’re talking Playstation-level explosions glommed onto frame like it was MS Paint, CGI blood that slides around on the frame as if on a transparency, and spent CGI shell casings ejected from guns that aren’t really firing. You make it through all that, you’re in for a real treat: A corpse-burning scene featuring the worst CGI flames since Pole Position on the Atari 2600 (to that scene’s credit, the corpse in question was sporting the haircut that shall henceforth be known as “The DeFalco”). And the way they so sparingly used blood squibs, you’d think they had to steal the two they had. It all makes the low-rent apocalypse of Rabid look epic by comparison.

As for the zombies, don’t let that scary bald fellow on the cover frighten you away. He’s not in it, and the zombies that are look way cheaper. But even aside from their unconvincing Halloween USA makeup (zombie makeup effects compliments of Topher Matthews, and I’ll bet you $10 cash money that five years ago he went by “Chris”), they just aren’t all that threatening: They stagger around like Romero zombies, but die just like regular people, like 28 Days Later zombies. And there aren’t very many of them. Beyond that, these zombies are oddly mannered in the way they feast upon the flesh of the living. They’re downright dainty about it. I guess New Englanders really are more refined.

Still, I’ll give credit where it’s due: They ride their $20,000 budget a hell of a lot farther than I thought it could take them. For reference, the budget for The Blair Witch Project was roughly twice as much, and those guys couldn’t even manage a real witch. Not even a shitty, fake-looking CGI witch. But this is chintz all the way, and only the hardest of the hardcore horror/bad-movie fans will want any part of it.

Video
It looks like it was put together by the high school AV club.

Audio
I don’t know. I don’t have much of a sound system. But those gunshots sure as hell sounded phony.

Extras
Those of you who scoff when a DVD lists “Chapter Selection” amongst its extras, scoff no more: There is no chapter selection feature here, so if you’re looking to skip to the scene with the “hot” waitress brandishing a fake shotgun or Torch’s profound monologue about, well, whatever the fuck he was talking about, you’ll have to find it yourself. Cross your fingers for a chapter selection on the two-disc Special Edition, slated for release in late never.

Despite that unsurprising omission, you can look forward to an especially deluded commentary by director Richard Griffin and “star” Billy Garberina, where you can hear them misuse the word “technophobe”, compare the bong scene to Mean Streets, and wax idiotic about the relationship between government and media. If that’s not enough to sate your appetite for all things Feeding The Masses, check out the behind-the-scenes featurette where the guy who plays the zombie-pimp biker offers up the worst Christopher Walken impression ever. On the absolutely-nothing-to-do-with-Feeding The Masses tip, there’s a pair of unpleasant short films, a hilariously self-congratulatory Shock-O-Rama promo overloaded with gratuitous footage of Lord Of The G-Strings megastar Misty Mundae, and a whole lot of shitty trailers, all yours to ignore at your leisure.

Summary
You’re never going to watch it. Hell, you’ll probably never see it on a store shelf. And I’d be shocked if Netflix carries it. So fuck it. Best movie ever made. And you can quote me on that, Shock-O-Rama.