"Feast"

Feast (2005)

Director: John Gulager

Review by John Dodd

Feast was the third and probably final of the Project: Greenlight winners. The film played some festivals and did a brief booking at midnight shows before arriving on DVD last Tuesday. I was lucky enough to catch Feast when it played the opening weekend of the inferior but far more advertised Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Beginning at my hometown theater.

Feast is a low budget horror film in the tradition of Night of the Living Dead or The Evil Dead where a group of losers hold themselves up in a secluded location (here a sleazy bar in the middle of nowhere) and fight the oncoming siege, in this case hungry aliens, and wait for dawn. While certainly not the equal of the films that influenced it, Feast is a down and dirty little movie that keeps on punching.

Each character is introduced with a title card explaining who they are and giving the chances of survival. Some of the dozen or so strandees include a brawny, take charge type nicknamed Hero (Eric Dane), his tough as nails wife (Navi Rawat), the town screw-up (Balthazar Getty), a stoic bartender (Clu Gulager, the director’s father and star of Return of the Living Dead), the sleazy bar owner (Duane Whitaker), a single mother waitress (Krista Allen) and her young son, and Jason Mewes from Jay and Silent Bob playing himself. Acting honors go to the hysterical Henry Rollins as Coach, a motivational speaker with a less than convincing plan to scare the aliens away.

Feast boasts an in-joke cleverness that does not condescend. Clearly made by fans, the film has a good time playing with genre expectations, surprising the audience a half a dozen times. Feast will be best received by those who have watched a fair amount of horror movies and like genre benders such as From Dusk Till Dawn.

I should admit to being psyched to like Feast before watching it. One of the writers, Marcus Dunston, is a hometown boy. Although he and I met only briefly, we both graduated a year apart from high schools less than ten miles from each other, we’re both Dario Argento fans from a community that believes he is the Prime Minister of Mexico, and we both worked at the same movie theater (albeit years apart). Nonetheless, I will be the first to say that Feast, while enjoyable, is not a horror classic. The middle section drags. The editing has much of that herky jerky, can’t-follow-what’s-going-on style en vogue this decade. Lastly, the super low budget clearly gets in the way of the filmmakers’ ambitions. If Feast had the budget of Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Beginning, it would have looked professional, but professionalism isn’t everything. Feast is far and away the better of the two movies, budget or not.