‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ receives 2 out of 10 stars.
Premiering on Tubi June 27th is ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children,’ directed by Destry Allyn Spielberg and starring Michelle Dockery, Zoe Colletti, Regan Aliyah, Dean Scott Vazquez, Andrew Liner, and Giancarlo Esposito.
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Initial Thoughts
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: the director of this film, Destry Allyn Spielberg, is in fact the daughter of Steven Spielberg. Whether that helped her land the gig is beside the point, as is the whole “nepo babies” argument. Why wouldn’t at least one offspring of one of the most famous directors in history show interest in pursuing the same career? Filmmaking – or any creative pursuit – can be just as much a family business as a restaurant or a construction company.
It ultimately comes down to whether said offspring has the talent to make a go of it on their own, and in the case of Destry Allyn Spielberg…the jury is still out. One thing she doesn’t have for now, however, is good taste in material. Spielberg has chosen for her feature directorial debut a script (by Paul Bertino) that is as generic as they come, a viral outbreak zombie horror pastiche loaded with standard genre tropes and saddled with a collection of flat, forgettable characters. It makes for an utterly boring experience, and it’s hard to say if even a better director could make something interesting out of this.
Story and Direction
“Harboring minors is a punishable offense.” That’s what we’re told as ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ begins, with an opening montage informing us that a deadly new virus has spread rapidly throughout the world. The plague turns adults into – surprise! – flesh-eating zombies, but it’s carried by kids (of whom very few end up getting the disease), which leads to a worldwide effort to capture children and quarantine them into detention camps.
The notion of adults all over the globe willingly turning their children in for incarceration or worse is difficult to believe even for a dystopian horror film, but Bertino’s screenplay doesn’t spend much time ruminating on the morals and ethics of the situation. It doesn’t spend much time on anything, really, as we meet Mary (Zoe Colletti), a young girl who is trying to escape being captured by getting on a bus going to “the border,” wherever that is (so much about this movie is frustratingly non-specific). But when she’s spotted by soldiers, she only gets away with the help of Jeffy (Dean Scott Vazquez), a rather annoying little kid who spirits her on his bike to the large abandoned warehouse he calls home along with his sister Vicky (Regan Aliyah) and a few other teens.
We’ve barely had time to get to even know these kids’ names when the soldiers show up (don’t ask me how Jeffy and his friends avoided this before) and roust them out. Fleeing in a van, the kids draw even more attention to themselves by bungling a convenience store heist before ending up at the door of Clara (Michelle Dockery), who lives in her huge house by herself while her police officer husband is away working. And before you can say ‘don’t eat those,’ Clara has fed the kids drugged milk and cookies and imprisoned them all in her surprisingly spacious attic, for purposes known only to her.
All this plays out in listless, predictable fashion, with a rinse-repeat second act that finds one or more kids getting out of the attic and either meeting a grim fate (Clara also has something in the basement) or getting caught by their hostess and imprisoned again. Spielberg pulls off a few nice compositions here and there, but also suffers from that debut-director syndrome of being in love with camera moves that draw attention to themselves, such as a shot in the kids’ warehouse lair that spins around and around like it wants you to call it out. There is gore and nastiness aplenty, but very little in the way of scares or emotional involvement, since there are no characters here for which we feel the least empathy.
All ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ (even its title doesn’t really make much sense in context) does is make you think of those other, better horror movies it’s riffing off, whether it’s ’28 Days Later,’ ‘Contagion,’ ‘Children of Men,’ or several others. There’s even a plot point reminiscent of ‘Bring Her Back’ from earlier this year. But all this only emphasizes how unoriginal ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ is. It’s like a zombie movie written by AI and directed by committee.
Cast and Performances
There’s no easy way to say this: the young actors in this movie are almost all lacking. Whether that’s a comment on their own talent or Spielberg’s aptitude with actors isn’t clear. Zoe Colletti as the ostensible protagonist, Mary, just doesn’t have the personality to carry a story like this, and with the exception of Regan Aliyah – who at least shows some spark, even with a cliched character – the rest of the ensemble also exhibits little to remember them by.
As for the two major adult names in the movie, Giancarlo Esposito shows up in a handful of scenes but doesn’t have much to do, and even this usually reliable veteran seems like he’s just collecting a paycheck. Michelle Dockery’s Clara, meanwhile, is unremittingly cruel and one-dimensional, and Dockery seems unsure whether to play it up for camp value or try for a genuinely evil portrayal. She ends up somewhere in a weird limbo between the two. It’s a very different role that what we’ve seen Dockery in before and she is game for it, pulling off a few creepy moments but also let down by the material.
Final Thoughts
Everybody starts somewhere, right? There are plenty of well-known directors out there who are probably embarrassed by their first attempts at making a feature film. The problem for Destry Allyn Spielberg is that, unfairly or not, she will probably get called out for leveraging her famous name while delivering a disappointing product.
Whether she can continue from here and forge a career on her own – and we wish her nothing but the best – she’ll have to pick her material more carefully. Shot in just 18 days (and feeling like it), ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ is vague, super-derivative, and mundane, with nothing to say thematically and nothing to add to an already well-worn genre.
WNgvQJHWWv5BGGVLVkGHc1What is the plot of ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’?
In a not-so-distant future where society is battling a deadly virus that is carried by children and afflicts the entire adult population, a group of orphans flee in search of a new life — only to be taken hostage by a woman hiding a sinister secret.
Who is in the cast of ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’?
- Michelle Dockery as Clara
- Zoe Colletti as Mary
- Regan Aliyah as Vicky
- Dean Scott Vazquez as Jeffy
- Andrew Liner as Ben
- Josh Melnick as Seth
- Emma Meisel as Crystal
- Vernon Davis as Hank
- Giancarlo Esposito as Fitz
Movies Similar to ‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’:
- ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)
- ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1979)
- ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985)
- ‘28 Days Later‘ (2003)
- ‘Dawn of the Dead‘ (2004)
- ‘Shaun of the Dead‘ (2004)
- ‘28 Weeks Later‘ (2007)
- ‘Children of Men’ (2007)
- ‘Carriers’ (2009)
- ‘Contagion’ (2011)
- ‘World War Z‘ (2013)
- ‘Warm Bodies‘ (2013)
- ‘The 5th Wave’ (2016)
- ‘Army of the Dead‘ (2021)
