This obscure 1988 film takes place in San Francisco.

Specifically, it takes place in the underground San Francisco art scene, a world where zoned out hipsters gather in a small clubs and listen to bands like Disease.  Disease (played by a real-life San Francisco band that was called The Nuns) sings songs that encourage the listeners to slit their wrists.  The police don’t care much for Disease and even several of the locals think that Disease is bad news.  Rumor has it that three Disease groupies died under mysterious circumstances.

While Disease sings, their fans get hooked on the drug DZS, which is also pronounced Disease.  (Yes, it gets a little bit hard to keep track of.)  DZS was developed to battle schizophrenia but it can also be used as a party drug and cause overdoses.

Speaking of death, there’s people dying all over San Francisco and Inspector Bernardo (Jonathan Zeichner) thinks that it’s because Disease isn’t just a band but also a brain-stealing cult.  Bodies are being found without huge sections of their brain.  Apparently, the murderer gouges out its victim’s eye and then sucks the brain out through the eye socket.  It does this while the victim is still alive.  Ouch!

Also investigating the murders is a reporter named Jean (Kate Alexander).  Jean has just recently left her husband so that she can be a member of the underground art scene.  She’s currently living with the lead singer of Disease, though he insists that their relationship is totally casual and that there’s no commitment involved.  Needless to say, Jean is not happy when Inspector Alonzo suggests that the band might be behind the murders.  (For one thing, traces of DZS are found on the majority of the victims.)  Jean’s investigation leads her to discover that not only is the city crawling with potential murderers but there’s also a mutant baby to deal with….

That’s right, a mutant baby.

Anyway, Night Feeder was shot on video and, from what I’ve been able to gather online, it was specifically sold in San Francisco video stores.  It was a regional production, meaning that the cast was populated with local actors and the production crew was largely local as well.  It was shot on location at clubs around the city, making the film into a bit of a time capsule if nothing else.  Oddly enough, the movie somehow found its way to Poland, where it became something a cult hit among Polish horror fans.  That’s just one of the many oddities of the film distribution.  You never know where your low-budget, shot-on-video movie might become a hit.

But, you may be asking — is the movie itself any good?  Eh …. it’s okay.  I mean, it’s a low-budget film that was shot on video and, even more importantly, it looks like it was shot on video.  It has the aesthetic quality of a student film.  The majority of the actors deliver their lines stiffly, though I did appreciate the energetic performance of Kate Alexander.  She did the best that one probably could with the material that she was given.  That said, the special effects were done by a guy who was a part of the VFX crew for David Cronenberg’s The Fly and, even for a straight-to-video production, some of the imagery is memorably grotesque.  So, if nothing else, the film has that going for it.

That said, I have a weakness for low-budget regional productions, especially ones that serve as a time capsule of a very particular time and place.  Night Feeder definitely does that and, as such, it’s worth watching just for the chance to see how people once lived.