It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.
There’s a bar in the middle of nowhere. It’s just an average night until a blood-drenched man with a shotgun bursts through the door and orders the patrons to fortify the place. “Who the hell are you?” the bartender asks. “I’m the guy who’s gonna save your ass,” the stranger replies in heroic confidence. A split second later, a monster bursts through the window rips his head off.
The monsters in Feast are draped in roadkill coats and cattle-skull masks. They’re gnarly-lookin’ creatures who rip and tear with gruesome panache. In a misguided act of desperation, the bar patrons attempt to scare them away by dangling a dead monster baby from a stick. In the gory aftermath of that scene, Henry Rollins’ character admits: “Yeah, that was a bad idea.”
I don’t know why I closely followed the development of Feast on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Project Greenlight, but never watched the movie until now. In case you’re unfamiliar with Project Greenlight, it was a reality TV show in which the famous actors plucked an unknown filmmaker from obscurity to make a feature length film. The first two movies that came out of Project Greenlight sucked so bad, Affleck and Damon decided to go for broke and make a balls-to-the-wall horror film.
Feast would be improved if the shots were just a little longer and the director didn’t try to be so damn cute in the first act. There’s an exhausting amount of wink-wink, nudge-nudge bullshit in the beginning, in which the filmmakers practically announce they’re going to give us the unexpected. Unfortunately, when you’re expecting the unexpected, you get exactly what you expected. If the film had lured us into believing it was a by-the-numbers horror picture (You’re Next comes to mind), the unexpected stuff would have been more rewarding, not to mention not as self-congratulatory. Never mind that. Everything else about Feast is great.
Most of these actors you’ll either know by name or recognize from other movies. Not only does it feature western actor Clu Gulager, it was directed by his son, John Gulager, the third season winner of Project Greenlight. After a success like this, John might be relegated to horror pictures for the rest of his life. I hope he’s comfortable with that because it’s clear that’s what he was born to do.
Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.
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