PLEASE DON'T FEED THE CHILDREN (2024)

Studio:   Tubi
Director: Destry Allyn Spielberg
Writer:   Paul Bertino
Producer: Jason Dubin, Josh Kesselman, Michael Hagerty, Bill Kenwright, Daniel Ryniker
Stars:    Michelle Dockery, Zoe Coletti, Andrew Liner, Dean Scott Vazquez, Regan Aliyah, Emma Meisel, Josh Melnick, Vernon Davis, Giancarlo Esposito

Review Score:

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Summary:

In a post-apocalyptic setting where children are hunted as suspected carriers of a deadly disease, six orphans looking to flee the country become captives in a suspicious woman’s home.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In a post-apocalyptic America where a viral outbreak turns infected adults into feral cannibals and children are hunted as suspected carriers of the disease, 16-year-old orphan Mary, who is haunted by the execution of her younger sister Lily, sneaks around a transportation depot hoping to board a bus out of the country to safety. When she’s spotted by guards, a resourceful boy named Jeffy rescues Mary by speeding her away on his bike.

Jeffy takes Mary back to a hideout where he introduces his older brother Ben, his older sister Vicky, their friend Seth, and Seth’s girlfriend Crystal. Although they’re initially wary of her, Mary gives the five friends hope that a map she recovered can guide them to an underground tunnel leading out of America. Hearing a police radio call identifying Mary and Jeffy for capture, the six of them set out immediately.

Mary, Jeffy, Ben, Vicky, Crystal, and Seth stop at a gas station to steal supplies, but a shootout ensues when Vicky gets caught. Mary shoots a clerk who calls the police. The injured clerk manages to shoot Ben in his shoulder before everyone flees.

The group’s van runs out of gas on a remote road near an isolated farmhouse. Desperate to find a way to help Ben, the friends attempt to sneak into the home, but they’re caught by its owner, Clara. Claiming to be a sympathetic nurse, Clara invites the six teens inside where she stitches Ben’s wound, though she warns Ben his injury risks infection. Clara also claims her husband Hank is a police officer who won’t be home for hours, allowing the kids to hide there undisturbed. She later adds that her beloved daughter Lauren tragically died.

While Clara makes them cookies, the six friends plot to steal her car. After eating her cookies, the kids make a sudden attempt to steal Clara’s keys at gunpoint. Unexpectedly, all of them quickly fall unconscious from drugs they unknowingly ate.

Jeffy, Ben, Vicky, and Crystal wake up to find themselves trapped in the attic. Mary wakes up safe in a bedroom where Clara begins treating Mary as a surrogate for her dead daughter. Having found the map in her backpack, Clara tells Mary that Border Patrol closed the tunnel she was looking for. Meanwhile, Seth recovers in a cellar where he becomes food for Clara’s secretly locked-up husband Hank, who is now a feral cannibal.

Local detective Fitz, a former friend of Hank’s, comes to the house looking for the escaped teens involved in the convenience store shootout. Although he remains suspicious as he looks around the property, Fitz leaves after Clara claims she never saw the children despite their van being parked down the road.

While the others continue to be treated as prisoners, Clara hosts a freshly dressed Mary for dinner. Mary attempts to steal a butter knife, but Clara catches her and gets it back.

Clara escorts Mary outside to garden in her greenhouse. Mary thinks about hitting Clara with a shovel, but she reconsiders after Clara has an emotional breakdown over her family tragedy.

Looking for a way out of the attic, Jeffy, Ben, Vicky, and Crystal smash a small hole through a thin wall. Vicky follows the pathway to a ladder leading into a study with a memorial for Hank, whom Clara claimed was still at work. Vicky recovers a pocketknife before sneaking back to the attic.

On their walk back to the house, Mary sees the others in the attic window. Ben and Crystal signal for Mary to distract Clara to buy Vicky more time, which Mary does.

Crystal begs Clara to let her see Seth. Clara agrees to take her to him. Jeffy, Ben, and Vicky implore her not to go, but Crystal tearfully tells them it will be okay. Crystal is subsequently terrified when she receives the same fate as her boyfriend and gets devoured by Hank in his cellar chamber.

As part of a plan to get outside and burn the greenhouse to draw out Clara, Vicky uses the passageway in the wall to sneak out again, but Clara catches Vicky and returns her to the attic. When Jeffy refuses to reveal how Vicky escaped, Clara forces Mary to give the boy a shock collar. Realizing what will happen, Vicky puts the collar on herself instead and admits to breaking a hole through the wall. Clara still forces a horrified Mary to electrically shock Vicky.

The following day, Clara informs Mary she has decided to put her in the attic with the others due to Mary’s continued sympathy for them. That night, Mary sneaks out of her room to recover the drug Clara put in the cookies. On her way back to bed, Mary spies Clara whispering at a wall with no one else there.

Over tea the next day, Clara claims she spoke to Hank the previous evening, which perplexes Mary. Clara cryptically says she couldn’t save her daughter Lauren, but she believes she can save Mary now that Hank told her if she gives Mary more time, Mary will eventually be convinced to stay willingly.

Clara collapses on the floor from the drug Mary secretly put in her drink. Using Clara’s keys, Mary goes outside and recovers Hank’s vintage Pontiac as an escape vehicle. Mary then returns inside to unlock the three siblings from the attic.

Having regained consciousness, Clara recaptures the four teens at gunpoint. Jeffy, Ben, and Vicky are returned to the attic while Mary is locked in Hank’s feeding room.

Fitz returns to Clara’s house. Insistent on answers with his suspicions heightened, Fitz dismisses Clara’s lies and eventually discovers Seth’s mangled corpse hidden outside.

Mary tries hiding from Hank as he continues feeding on Crystal’s body. Hank finally attacks Mary, but he stops after recognizing her resemblance to his daughter. Mary escapes the cellar by crawling through a trough of blood and grisly human remains.

Fearing Fitz is close to exposing her, Clara goes to the attic to execute the three captives. From a hiding spot, Jeffy stabs Clara with the pocketknife Vicky gave him earlier. Clara collapses on the floor.

Mary rejoins Jeffy, Ben, and Vicky in the main house, but she is followed by Hank, who bites Vicky. Hearing Jeffy’s screams, Fitz breaks through the locked front door to shoot Hank. Having recovered from the knife attack, Clara shoots Fitz dead. Mary uses the opening to kill Clara by stabbing her in the neck with a knitting needle.

Mary and Jeffy rush outside to start the car, but they are interrupted by another attack from Hank. Vicky saves Mary and Jeffy by shooting Hank dead. Before everyone can escape, Ben dies from his infected gunshot wound.

Jeffy realizes his sister was infected by Hank’s bite when black veins appear on her body. To spare her brother from having to euthanize her, Vicky tells Jeffy to bury her with Ben before shooting herself in the head. Emotionally drained and devastated by the deaths, Mary drives away with Jeffy in the Pontiac’s backseat despite a worrisome bite on the boy’s arm.

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Review:

“Please Don’t Feed the Children” drapes a bleak backdrop for its setting. Under opening credits, sound bites snipped from unseen newscasters chronicle the timeline of a disturbing disease. Capable of turning humans into feral cannibals, the outbreak killed millions. Since they were originally asymptomatic, children came to be blamed for carrying the virus while mutated adults died in droves around them. With no hope for a cure, the government implemented a mandate to execute anyone infected.

Narration from 16-year-old orphan Mary picks up from there. After one kid suddenly developed symptoms, all children were rounded up and imprisoned in camps for observation. Only 1% of them were capable of getting sick, but that didn’t stop the government from villainizing the entire under-18 demographic. Some managed to make it out of the camps, but many were murdered trying to escape. Remaining children live in constant fear of capture as they desperately search for some way to sneak out of the country.

Not wanting to suffer the same fate as her stuffed animal-clutching little sister, who takes a bullet through her head in a shocking flashback “Please Don’t Feed the Children” dares to depict, Mary plots a path to a bus heading over the border. She doesn’t make it far when she’s spotted by a guard. Unexpectedly, rescue comes from a resourceful boy named Jeffy, who has Mary hop onto his bicycle as he speeds back to his hideout.

At the hideout, Mary meets four more orphans. Initially skeptical of Mary’s plan to find a hidden tunnel leading into Mexico, this newly formed sextet has no choice but to go on the run after they intercept a police alert calling for Mary and Jeffy’s capture. Once again, they don’t make it far, as a stop to steal supplies turns into a convenience store shootout where one of the teens, Ben, takes a gunshot to his shoulder.

Bad breaks keep coming when the group’s van runs out of gas. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately considering how the ball bounces, there’s a remote farmhouse nearby where they might be able to help heal Ben’s bullet wound. Clara, the home’s only occupant, appears sympathetic to the six children, yet there’s something suspicious about her motives that’ll take the evening into a turn none of the teens anticipated.

The preceding paragraphs cover roughly the first third of the film. By this point, viewers have been fed a steady diet of “A Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia where children replace women as the subjugated group in a post-apocalyptic landscape populated with flesh-eating zombies as well as pint-sized survivors struggling to subsists off scraps.

Yet all of this narrative buildup turns out to be window dressing for a movie that ultimately reveals itself to be a reverse home invasion thriller. This can make “Please Don’t Feed the Children’s” premise feel like false advertising to lure viewers into an otherwise ordinary slow-burner, where would-be thieves become prisoners of a weird woman in a house that happens to be surrounded by lurking threats we only briefly glimpse, and aren’t entirely integral to the unfolding drama.

That drama also drags because there’s no real urgency built into the teen captives’ dilemma. Clara sees Mary as a surrogate for her dead daughter, so she gives the girl a bedroom, fresh dresses, gardening lessons, and takes her on a gradual tour of the property over the course of several days. In the meantime, the others casually look for a way to escape imprisonment in the attic. One of them is taken to a cellar chamber to become a meal for a monster whose true identity is treated like a surprise, even though anyone paying the slightest bit of attention can guess who it is long before the film finally shows them. Some of these stalls could have been fixed with small tweaks, like having Ben’s injury bleeding out instead of taking a week to become infected, providing a countdown of sorts to spur his friends into more immediate action.

An unhurried pace hits further speed bumps thanks to more than a few questionable behaviors that only make sense for artificially delaying the plot’s slow progression. After the teens find an escape route in a wall, why does only one of them use it, not to mention do so little with their first opportunity? Then when Mary makes her own move to flee, why does she first go outside to recover a getaway vehicle before freeing everyone locked in the attic? This is to say nothing of how many times the script inserts a serendipitous moment of unconsciousness, or how a car starts just fine until it’s time to escape and suddenly the engine no longer turns over.

There’s nothing overwhelmingly “wrong” with the movie. There’s nothing overwhelmingly original about it either. Giancarlo Esposito is a great get for a supporting role as a wary detective, except his part is so small, it could have been played by any competent actor with a SAG card. At least three of the teens have indistinguishable personalities. Their collective blandness is almost enough to make one wish for standard stereotyping like brash jerk, reckless socialite, cautious egghead, or traumatized mute.

With a tragic ending that fights neck and neck against the opening for how dour the mood can get, at a minimum I admire director Destry Allyn Spielberg for having the fearlessness to be bold, not with the story but with the heavy hand of child endangerment, for her first feature. No matter what, “Please Don’t Feed the Children” of course has the curiosity factor that comes with her family name being attached to it. Outside of that though, “Please Don’t Feed the Children” is mostly another average movie sent to swim without a life preserver in an endless sea of similarly mid streaming content.

Review Score: 55

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