Please Don’t Feed the Children is now streaming on Tubi.
If you’re going to a stranger’s house for safety in the aftermath of the apocalypse, it’s important to knock on the right door. In Please Don’t Feed the Children, Tubi’s new original horror movie directed by Destry Allyn Spielberg, a group of orphans gets more than they bargain for when they stumble upon Clara, an isolated housewife played by Michelle Dockery. What starts as a novel – if dubious – spin on the end of the world quickly becomes a bland, overcooked nothing burger, no thanks to Paul Bertino’s one-dimensional screenplay and Spielberg’s unsteady direction.
It starts with news audio explaining the premise: a deadly virus is “turning people into cannibals,” and the world now sees children as a threat, since “most under 18 are asymptomatic when bitten.” Our main character, Mary, played by Fear the Walking Dead’s Zoe Colletti, is trying to flee the country after escaping from a prison camp for children. A chance meeting has her banding together with five other orphans, but their trip to the border is waylaid by a dead car and a bad injury, causing them to knock on Clara’s farmhouse door.
We haven’t even gotten to the real action, and this story is already wearing thin. Why would a virus discriminate based on age? Once a child turns 18, are they somehow no longer a threat? Are all of the orphans even minors? Two of the boys look well past teenhood – one of them so much so that he easily masquerades as an adult on their journey.
It’s also difficult to situate Please Don’t Feed the Children in a particular place, and this is a movie where geography matters. For quite some time, it’s unclear what border the orphans are fleeing to. An old brochure with a palm tree implies Mexico, but Clara and Mary have a conversation about Belize. (Which – what? Belize borders Mexico and Guatemala.) Towards the very end, it becomes apparent that Clara lives in New Mexico, but that only raises more questions. Namely, how did a posh British lady end up living on a farm in New Mexico?
It would be harder to get stuck on these confounding details if the plot wasn’t so obvious. We’ve got a group of refugees in the clutches of a woman who says her daughter succumbed to the virus and her husband is out at work. She’s clearly hiding something. The virus turns people into cannibals. Gee, I wonder what will happen?
Bertino’s no-kids-allowed take on pandemic paranoia is ultimately just a backdrop for much more pedestrian storytelling, a mishmash of previous movie and TV depictions of doomsday. Maybe Spielberg could have made more of this mediocre tale, but she, too, relies on tired horror tropes, disposing of the horniest characters first and reducing Mary to a flat final girl. The small thrills Please Don’t Feed the Children does offer – a Christmas-themed jump scare, a dip in a bucket of blood – aren’t enough to make it stand out.
Spielberg’s timid direction also contributes to the movie’s muddiness and hobbles its capable performers (who also include Giancarlo Esposito as a police detective searching for the missing kids). She seems to have forgotten that old moviemaking axiom: Show, don’t tell. The camera, guided by cinematographer Shane Sigler, doesn’t offer a clear view of some key props and spaces, and a few scenes are too dimly lit to see much of anything at all. Though the winsome Dockery and Colletti lead her cast, Spielberg gives them little more to do than rage and cry, respectively. This is especially vexing for Dockery’s character – after all, what’s more chilling than a horror villain who always minds their manners?
Please Don’t Feed the Children has a few things going for it – the costuming and production design are, weirdly, great! – but this first feature definitely doesn’t feel like it comes from a descendant of filmmaking royalty. The already middling story is further diluted by wishy-washy visuals and one-note characters. This movie isn’t boring, exactly, but it is confusing. Once you piece together the extremely predictable story, you’re left to sit and wonder how it all went wrong.