LITTLE BITES - Mark Reviews Movies

Little Bites, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 3, 2024

The monster in Little Bites is a monster and probably a metaphor, too. It has to represent something, because the movie is just a very silly horror movie otherwise.

It's still a very silly movie, in which a young widow must constantly offer her body to be eaten by a creature that has taken up residence in a downstairs guest bedroom. The thing even rings a bell when it's hungry, and Mindy (Krsy Fox) keeps going downstairs, offering her arm to the thing, and repeating the process every time the monster rings that damned bell.

What could the monster, named Agyar and played by Jon Skarloff under some wrinkly makeup and a bald cap, represent? An initial thought might be some form of addiction, since the bell rings at all hours of the day and night without any rhyme or reason. Mindy isn't happy to participate in this strange ritual, obviously, but she does it anyway out of a kind of bored obligation and sense of routine.

The fact that Mindy has removed her 10-year-old daughter to live with the girl's grandmother, Mindy's mother, while she sorts out how to fix the problem and get rid of Agyar supports such a line of thought, for sure. Whatever plan Mindy might have in mind, though, isn't working, and in the meantime, her body and mind are slowly but surely being destroyed by the repeated, destructive visits to the monster.

Eventually, that metaphor doesn't hold up, as the story delves into notions of parenthood, which might be an even more subversive and tantalizing allegory—the feeling of a child picking apart at a parent's sense of self, freedom, and mind and body. The issue with that thought, of course, is that Mindy's daughter isn't even around when writer/director Spider One introduces this odd scenario.

Plus, there's the fact that Agyar's ultimate goal is to use Mindy to get at the girl, so maybe the creature represents grief or depression, since Mindy is a widow. That can't be the case, though, because the dead husband receives maybe two or three mentions across the entirety of the movie, while Mindy doesn't seem too upset about the guy's death when the subject arises, anyway. To be fair to the woman, she is a bit preoccupied with a monster eating her flesh and standing in for whatever the hell it is Agyar is supposed to represent.

Sometimes, a monster is just a monster, obviously, and there's an argument that such is the case with Agyar. After all, other characters here can hear the bell, see the creature, and also be eaten by it to different degrees of consumption. A concerned social worker (played by Barbara Crampton) shows up a couple of times to the house to check on the daughter's well-being. When Mindy explains that the girl is with her grandmother, the social worker takes a look around the house, hears the dinner bell, and decides to check the room.

It's empty, though, so maybe, all of this is just in Mindy's head. In case the uncertainty of this constant back-and-forth isn't frustrating enough, Mindy later invites a stranger (played by Chaz Bono) she meets at a bus stop over to the house, hoping to find a new victim for Agyar. The consequences of that scene still leave open the possibility that the monster is all in Mindy's mind, but when the social worker returns, her next investigation into the guest bedroom pretty much clears up whether Agyar is real or not.

The screenplay veers and changes its intentions so many times that the whole movie leaves us feeling as if we're grasping at anything and everything it tries to offer, only to pull back nothing but questions. If the monster is real, why doesn't Mindy just leave the house, too? Sure, she and her mother (played by Bonnie Aarons) have a difficult relationship, but that discomfort must be significantly less than what the entity downstairs is doing to her. Such a gap in logic forces us to think Agyar can't simply be a standard creature existing under a certain set of rules, but by the end, the monster is what it is, which turns out not to be much of a threat worth worrying about in the first place.

Little Bites does provide a certain atmosphere or dread, claustrophobia, and helplessness, and some of the many half-considered ideas here are intriguing. The movie is so indecisive, though, that the mood and those vague notions are the only elements it has to offer.

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