George (Julian Bailey) tries his best to quietly slide through life, providing for his wife, Jeanette (Susanne Egli) and his two sons, Jon (James Wiersum) and Eddie (Drew Page). Unfortunately, along the home front, this has made him an almost ghostly presence in the house, browbeaten on one end and ignored on the other. But with his vacation time from work finally at hand, George can at least take some time to relax.
Except that he’s getting strange phone calls from an old acquaintance named Randy (Terry Hempleman), and runs afoul of some young men who were beating another boy to death in a nearby cornfield. Chased back to his homestead, Randy hides out in his barn, fearful for his life. Which is when Randy appears, brutally taking care of the threat. With wife and kids away from home, it’s just George and Randy…
Paul Danhauser and Travis Anderson’s Feeding Randy is a psychological thriller with a friendly dose of blood and guts. While I’ve done my best not to say too much about what happens in this one, this isn’t the type of film where anything that happens is going to surprise you that much. At least not if you’re a fan of psychological thrillers in the last decade or so. Still, for all that it does that we’ve seen before, it does so in a bite-sized enough chunk for its familiarity to not to be a nuisance.
Which actually could be a problem, depending on what the filmmakers hope to accomplish with the film. At just under forty minutes, it’s not quite a feature, not quite a short. While it never feels too long (just the contrary, it moves so well you don’t even notice that it is as long as it is), I don’t know what you do with a film of this length, honestly. Where does it end up? It’s notoriously challenging to program shorts of this length at fests, it’s not quite TV-friendly length and would someone take a chance on the DVD?
So it’s a potentially unfortunate distribution situation for a film that is actually pretty good, and one with an edit that moves right along. Again, it may play in the familiar, but it does a good job of it. The music was a little too Danny Elfman-style for my tastes, especially over the opening credits, but it’s not so over-the-top as to take you out of the film. Notable, but not awful.
In the end, if you like a pretty good psychological thriller, then give Feeding Randy a look if and when you can.
This film was submitted for review through our Submission for Review system. If you have a film you’d like us to see, and we aren’t already looking into it on our own, you too can utilize this service.
