The film reduced Wells' tale to an "Ecology Strikes Back" scenario, common in science fiction movies at the time. The "food" mysteriously bubbles up from the ground on a remote island somewhere in British Columbia. Mr. and Mrs. Skinner consider it a gift from God, and feed it to their chickens, which grow larger than humans as a result. Rats, wasps, and grubs also consume the substance, and the island becomes infested with giant vermin. One night, a swarm of giant rats kill Mr. Skinner after his car tire is punctured in the forest. A professional football player named Morgan is on the island for a hunting trip with his buddies when one of them is stung to death by giant wasps. After ferrying his friends back to the mainland, Morgan returns to investigate. Also thrown into the mix are Thomas and Rita, an expecting couple; Jack Bensington, the owner of a dog food company, who hopes to market the substance; and Bensington's assistant Lorna, a bacteriologist. After Morgan locates and dynamites the giant wasps' enormous nest, he and the others become trapped in the Skinner's farmhouse, surrounded by giant rats. Mrs. Skinner, Morgan's friend Brian, and Bensington are killed by the rats. Morgan blows up a nearby dam, flooding the area and drowning the rats, whose size and weight renders them unable to swim. After the waters clear, the survivors pile up the bodies of the rats, spilling the jars of "F.O.T.G." and gasoline on them before burning them. However, several of Mrs. Skinner's jars of "F.O.T.G." are swept away, drifting to a mainland farm. The substance is consumed by dairy cows, and in the film's closing scene, schoolchildren are shown unwittingly drinking the tainted milk, implying that they will also experience abnormal growth.
The movie was AIP's most successful release of the year, causing them to make a series of films based on H. G. Wells novels. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film one star out of four. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "a stunningly ridiculous mixture of science-fiction and horror-film clichés." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film half of one star out of four and wrote, "The heavy television ad campaign promises six-foot roosters and panther-sized rats. What it should promise, if truth-in-labeling applied to film ads, is rotten special effects and a laughable script." Arthur D. Murphy of Variety wrote, "Too much emphasis by Gordon on his good special visual effects combines with too little attention to his writing chores... Every player has done better before; this script is atrocious." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the entire picture is a joke—unintentionally." Tom Milne of The Monthly Film Bulletin called it "A truly appalling piece of s-f horror in which the cretinous dialogue, hopefully illuminating the follies of human greed and tampering with nature, poses more of a hazard to the cast than the crudely animated giant wasps or the monster rat and cockerel heads stiffly manipulated from the wings." The Food of the Gods was nominated for the Best Horror Film by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films in the 1976 Saturn Awards. It has a score of 24% at Rotten Tomatoes from 17 reviewers, with an average score of 3.74/10.
Sequel
A sequel entitled Food of the Gods II was released in 1989.
