To give one an idea of this film’s shoot, Bottom Feeder, writer/director Randy Daudlin’s parvum opus from 2007, was Tom Sizemore’s first movie after he got out of rehab. As if that weren’t tough enough for an actor who had spent the past decade in supporting roles in top tier movies, Sizemore brought along a TV crew capturing the entire thing for the reality show Shooting Sizemore. An actor who had been flirting with A-list status, in recovery, with the pressures of carrying a movie and a television show at the same time, in a b-movie titled Bottom Feeder? It’s amazing this thing ever made it into the can.
Sizemore plays Vince Stoker, a Vietnam War veteran (Sizemore was born in 1961) who currently works as a maintenance man at a shuttered mental hospital. He leads a small crew, including right hand man Otis (Martin Roach), young dipshit Callum (Joe Dinicol), and his niece, Sam (Amber Cull). Part of their job is to patrol the tunnels under the property that link the buildings, and roust out any teenage partiers or homeless people who have set up camp.
Meanwhile, eccentric billionaire Charles Deavers (Richard Fitzpatrick), horribly scarred and left in a wheelchair from a fire, has contracted with research scientist Nathaniel Leech (James Binkley) to purchase a serum he’s developed that will heal any bodily injury. It’s a true miracle drug, but as the good doctor exposits early on in the movie, there is a catch. The drug will heal anything, but on administration it causes an insatiable hunger that requires the administration of a concentrated protein solution, otherwise the patient will seek out any source of food. This is a problem because while the drug is working it draws from available DNA or some such 
to rebuild the body. In effect, without the protein solution, one becomes what one eats. This is explained to the viewer in the first scene, and I can’t think of a monster movie off the top of my head that telegraphs the coming creature to such an extent.
Deavers, because he is the evil businessman of the flick, has his henchwoman, Krendal (Wendy Anderson), inject Leech with the drug to see if it works, and Leech is then locked away. Wouldn’t you know it, he’s locked in the very same tunnels that Vince and company work in. Anyone who’s seen a monster flick knows where this is going.
I haven’t seen Shooting Sizemore, and it’s not available anywhere online. It is known that Sizemore quit this movie during shooting. He came back and finished it, but I can understand why he decided to bail. As mentioned above, the pressure he was under must have been staggering. He needed a comeback, and what was the best he could do? A direct-to-video rehash of a movie he did ten years earlier. He must have looked around and seen the direction of the remainder of his career, and it looked bleak. If so, he was right. The glory days were over, even though he was never without work for the remainder of his life. I sympathize. I’m not sure he could have picked a worse project to undertake right out of rehab.
This is a hopeless movie. The production quality is straight out of The Asylum or Roger Corman’s more miserly enterprises. Exteriors were shot at a real abandoned mental hospital, which were plentiful at the time, and always interesting locations. But the majority of the film takes place in a small set consisting of two windowless, grey hallways and a storage room, all shot from as many angles as possible to make it look more extensive than it really was. The required suspension of disbelief is just too much for the viewer.
This is a monster flick, so, how about the monster? Leech, the poor soul who turned into the monster, satisfied the insatiable hunger brought on by the drug by chowing on the rats in the tunnels. So, he turned into a rat man. The monster resembles the old Universal Wolf Man, only with rat features and a copious amount of slime to make him shine on camera. In the end, it’s just a guy in a suit, and only super healing caused by the drug makes the monster a real menace.
Bottom Feeder is a boilerplate monster flick, severely limited by budget, and filmmakers who couldn’t rise above such restrictions. Casting Sizemore was probably a huge win for Daudlin and company. To his credit, Sizemore delivers a typical Sizemore performance. Yet, there’s a weariness to the performance that becomes more apparent when one knows a little of his struggles. Come for the blood, stay for the tragedy. Bottom Feeder is truly a bottom feeder, displacing Army of the Dead at #459 in the Watchability Index.