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Hey it’s time for a ragtag bunch of folk to be couped up for a night of monster terrorizin’. OK – that’s Feast in its simplest form. But not for long as we’re immediately clued in that the filmmakers are aware of our expectations. We get a thorough introduction to over a dozen-plus characters (including Jason Mewes apparently playing himself.) There’s the town jackass (Balthazar Getty) and his wheelchair-bound brother (Josh Zuckerman); the bartender (Clu Gulager) and his staff – waitresses (hot) Honey Pie (Jenny Wade) and (weather-worn but even hotter) Tuffy (Krista Allen) who has a young son (Tyler Patrick Jones) and a hillbilly boyfriend (Duane Whitaker); the delivery guy (Judah Friedlander) and elderly barfly (Eileen Ryan); a biker chick (Diane Goldner) and the guy looking for an affair (Henry Rollins). If you’re already marking off your horror checklist of who the odds-on favorites are to survive, writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton are way ahead of you by providing not just their name and occupation, but life expectancy.

Bursting into the bar this night are a man (Eric Dane) and his wife (the beautiful Navi Rawat from TV’s Numbers whose job description is to kick ass in a tanktop) and they have some nasty buggers in pursuit. What they are and where they came from is of little consequence when you have patrons being devoured immediately and blood spraying by the gallons. The ferocious exuberance displayed in the first 15 minutes will both overjoy even the most average of horror fans and have them skeptical that there’s no way director John Gulager can keep it up. The fact that he does is not the only surprise in store.

In the post Kevin Williamson era, horror writers have found it necessary to keep up a self-referential tone not just to wink at its base of fans but to draw in those who snub their nose at a genre they gave up on years ago thanks to its never-ending cliché. The intro montages wears out its cuteness by about two or three nice-to-meet-yas, but Feast’s sense of humor doesn’t just nestle up to tearing down the obvious. There are character quirks such as Friedlander’s assertion that they are “Uppercased fucked!” countered by Rollins’ positive thinker classifying this as a “species standoff” that requires them to think out of the box. His Rooseveltesque solution – “I need a stick.” Getty has some terrific one liners and great interaction with Ryan whom he foolishly looks to guidance. You’ve seen the Alien Queen spit out her eggs from a giant sac, but I guarantee you’ve never witnessed monsters getting it on to replace their brethren faster than water through a Gremlin.

The greatest travesty of the modern horror landscape is having its soul sold to the PG-13 era. Gore is either a crutch or an exclamation point, depending on the filmmaker’s skill and confidence in the material. One of the many impressive aspects of Feast is that being aware of its limited budget, Gulager and team have piled on the bloodletting to dam-breaking effect and ogles that line between extreme horror and giddy glee that masters Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson perfected. The monster effects are equally grand and ghastly with just enough creativity in their limited visualization to make us squirm.

Feast was screened as a work-in-progress at the Chicago Film Festival and any complaints about the film are in the color correction departments with a few overly dark shots which weren’t a plus within the Pvt. Ryan editing in a few moments which is a more legitimate issue. Horror fans have been so hungry to have their genre find a resurgence that anything which got whispers from festivals or overseas, like the overrated Cabin Fever and Dog Soldiers, broke free into cults shouting their names. Even the gore-drenched High Tension short-circuited its clever chip by a third. Feast throws us right into the blood pool and keeps everyone afloat except maybe for those with weak stomachs and hand-shaped eye curtains.

The R-rated horrors may be limping towards a comeback but it’s going through its own transition through a string of awful remakes (The Amityville Horror, House of Wax). And when all else fails – bring it back down to a PG-13 (The Fog). Maybe it’s the price we must pay to get the occasional Dawn of the Dead, where skepticism is thrust aside in favor of a joy of filmmaking and an intolerance for just giving an audience the bare minimum for their nine bucks. Horror fans deserved Feast and, more importantly, the monster movie deserved it after being relegated mostly to video shelves and taking a back seat to the serial killer renaissance. Project Greenlight and Dimension must do right by Feast. You may add nepotism to its list of faults (John is Clu’s son) but the greater one would be letting this charmed third outing rot away in just another 13 theatres. Considering Dimension’s recent offerings (Darkness, Below, They, Cursed, Venom and the upcoming awful Wolf Creek), they could use a bit of redemption themselves.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13197&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/16/05 05:55:22
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