Crew
Director – Destry Allyn Spielberg, Screenplay – Paul Bertino, Producers – Jason Dubin, Michael Hagerty, Josh Kesselman, Bill Kenweight & Daniel Ryniker, Photography – Shane Sigler, Music – Cornell Wilczek, Visual Effects – Bot VFX (Supervisor – John Britto), Special Effects Supervisor – Scott Hastings, Makeup Effects Designer – Barney Burman, Production Design – Kai Boydell. Production Company – Perry Street Films/Head Gear Films/Metrol Technologies/Fieldhouse Productions/Altitude Film Entertainment/Sugar 23/BK Studios.
Cast
Zoe Coletti (Mary), Michelle Dockery (Clara), Dean Scott Vazquez (Jeffy), Regan Aliyah (Vicky), Giancarlo Esposito (Detective Fitz), Andrew Liner (Ben), Joshua Melnick (Seth), Emma Meisel (Crystal), Jessica Osbourne (Clerk)
Plot
A zombie plague is sweeping across the country. It is believed to be carried by children and they have been ordered confined into camps. Sixteen-year-old Mary has escaped from the camps and tries without success to make it across the border in New Mexico. Young Jeffy offers her shelter where he lives at an abandoned community centre with several other children. They flee as the authorities come but are shot at as they try to rob a convenience store. Their car breaks down and they are forced to take refuge in the farmhouse of Clara. There the others are imprisoned while Clara seems to want to regard Mary as a replacement for her dead daughter.
Nepo babies is a term that emerged in 2022 – nepo being short for nepotism – to refer to the children of celebrities who try to launch their own careers in the industry. They have been harshly criticized, seen as gaining a foot up based on their surname and parents’ connections over others who have to work from the ground up. (One of the more glaring of the nepo babies, Stephen King’s son Owen, is listed as an executive producer here). The argument against the nepo baby theory is that having a famous name is likely to get your foot in the door once, a substantial lack of talent is unlikely to get anybody to rehire them a second time.
There are clear examples of nepo baby syndrome – the talent-free likes of Jaden Smith, Max Landis, Dakota Johnson, Mike Norris, Don Swayze, Frank Stallone. But would one consider dismissing the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Douglas, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Byce Dallas Howard, Margaret Qualley, Carrie Fisher, Angelina Jolie, Jane and Peter Fonda, David Carradine, Stellan Skarsgård, Sofia Coppola or Drew Barrymore – all nepo babies. Maybe late 2025 is the wrong time to be a nepo baby as it is being dragged into ill repute by Nick Reiner’s murders of his parents and by the distasteful ways the Trump children are exploiting his name to peddle dodgy crypto schemes and the like.
I try to keep an open mind with Please Don’t Feed the Children, which comes from Destry Allyn Spielberg, the 29-year-old daughter of Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw. Prior to this, Destry had directed a couple of short films and had some minor acting roles, most notedly a small part in Licorice Pizza (2021). I wanted to give Destry Allyn Spielberg a chance. After all, M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana had done very impressive things with her directorial debut The Watchers (2024). The film premiered at the Catalonia International Film Festival but did not receive a proper release until a over a year later via Tubi.
Like her father, Destry turns to the horror genre to make her debut. (Steven Spielberg’s first and third films were respectively Duel (1971) and Jaws (1975) both made when he was in his mid-twenties). What is clear is that Destry is seeking to make a film that is a world away from anything her father would have made in his heyday. In films like E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Empire of the Sun (1987) and War of the Worlds (2005), or even his own autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022), Spielberg’s kids are resolutely from the same circumstances he is – white kids from comfortable middle-class backgrounds. By contrast, Destry’s kids are orphans living in the margins of society as fugitives and are a mixed ethnic group. Most tellingly, while Steven sees the greatest happiness in life as being children finding their way back the arms of a loving home, here that is inverted and we have Michelle Dockery’s character who insists on trying to recreate a regular family unit but is someone clearly unhinged from whom the others are all trying to escape. It is hard to think of two depictions so diametrically opposed.
I really wanted to give Destry enough rope to prove herself. But I had sinking feelings about Please Don’t Feed the Children from the opening few scenes where we have a military border checkpoint with Zoe Coletti and Dean Scott Vazquez hiding amongst a wrecker’s yard of abandoned car bodies. It makes zero military sense for a checkpoint to be stationed so close – less than thirty feet – from abundant cover for attackers or places to sneak pass the crossing. From there we go to the abandoned community centre, which has been artfully arranged around a swimming pool with multiple couches, has even connected to the mains. I don’t know if any of you have ever hung around with teenagers for any length of time but interior decoration, let alone dragging around furniture, is not something they seem interested in – any parent can tell you the difficulty involved in getting them just to clean their room rather than expect someone else to do it for them. It looks like an idea for a reclaimed abandoned area allowed free reign by a set designer who has no children of their own.
Steven Spielberg’s earlier films like Duel and The Sugarland Express (1974), even his earlier tv works, are overspilling with style and talent. You can look at them and see someone in the process of definitely going someplace. By contrast, you look at Destry’s film and search for anything – even a single scene or directorial set-up – that you remember afterwards. Everything shouts out as being generic fodder – I have watched a LOT of B-budget horror films and there is nothing in Please Don’t Feed the Children that is any different from any of these. My viewing companion – not usually given to commentary – spoke up on a couple of occasions to say “You call that a chase scene?” re the bicycle getaway near the start and “that was the lamest zombie showdown ever” – and I can’t disagree. Destry has no ability to handle action/tension/drama in these scenes. Why she could not have asked her father for some tips about how to improve what she had is beyond me? I have a mental image of Steven Spielberg in the screening room afterwards politely trying to find encouraging things to say to his daughter.
And that brings us to the least satisfying aspect of Please Don’t Feed the Children – that it is meant to be a Zombie Film. Maybe it is that the zombie film genre is so played out creatively that this was trying to do something different – but, if so, why not simply make a film about children carrying an infection, which would have taken minimal rewriting. This is a film that needed a great deal more given over in terms of explanation to the background of its world – all that we get is the narration over the opening credits and that is it.
Destry seems far more interested in the Imprisonment Thriller aspect, which takes up fully two-thirds of the film. However, the scenes with Michelle Dockery keeping the kids a prisoner in her house are just not that interesting. Other films have done this sort of thing with far more tension. Eventually, Destry lets the film’s single zombie out of the bag in the last fifteen minutes, by which time it is far too late in the game. Especially for a film that sits within the zombie genre, it feels like a critical miscalculation. When talk of the infection is introduced at the start of the film, what you don’t expect is to almost never be referred to again throughout and to only end up providing a single zombie right at the end. It should also be noted that the title Please Don’t Feed the Children never actually refers to anything in the film.
Trailer here