Movie Info
Movie Name: Feast
Studio: Dimension Films
Genre(s): Horror
Release Date(s): October 14, 2005 (Chicago International Film Festival)/September 22, 2006 (US)
MPAA Rating: R
Gimme some food!!!
In a dusty desert bar, hell is coming. When a stranger (Eric Dane) and his wife (Navi Rawat) arrive speaking of creatures hunting the desert, survival becomes the key. The creatures outside of the bar want in, and they are hungry. With ammo running out and facing unthinkable odds, the people of the bar are doing everything they can to avoid being the next course in a bloodthirsty feast.
Directed by John Gulager, Feast is a survival monster horror movie. The film was made in conjunction with Project Greenlight where Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton, and John Gulager were selected as the winners of the third season. The film was released to mixed to negative reviews.
I never got to see Project Greenlight when it aired, but Feast had me more interested than previously released films. The idea of a high concept, sloppy, grindhouse horror movie was fun and since it was a different approach, I had some hope for the film…unfortunately, it was kind of like a knock-off of better films.
Is it looking better?
Watching Feast is like watching From Dusk Till Dawn. When I first watched From Dusk Till Dawn, I wished that the whole movie was vampires (though I realize the hook of from Dusk Till Dawn was the mash-up and switch flip of crime film meet vampire movie). Feast is From Dusk Till Dawn without the crime part and also missing the talents of Rodriguez and Tarantino on the script. The movie sets up intentionally cardboard cutouts of horror hero tropes and plays with them, but it stops being clever after a bit and then just falls into “bad horror”.
The cast is good and that is part of the disappointment. The movie is loaded down with some names and some actors that you recognize and you aren’t quite sure from where. This is to keep the “survival” question in the air. Characters like Eric Dane and Jason Mewes (playing Jason Mewes), get their head or their faced ripped off and are done in a flash, while names like Henry Rollins are a bit too famous to survive because I can’t see him doing a sequel. Balthazar Getty in that sense is a good happy medium and an obvious winner. The “Final Girl” is of course up for debate but Krista Allen is the logical choice while watching a film that tries to subvert expectations so much that it doesn’t subvert them at all. I do commend Jenny Wade’s “Honey Pie” who does what more people in horror movies need to do…aka get the hell out of there and don’t look back.
It’s so cute when they are young and horny
The creatures are pretty cool, but with a different and practical creature, the viewer never gets very many good looks at them (without quick cuts and edits which are almost mind-numbing and hard to follow). I like how the creatures wear a kind of carapace from their “victims” that protects them as they murder.
Feast has its moments, but mostly it feels like it is just there. The attempts to make an original horror movie feel desperate and the result is a movie that doesn’t really feel original at all. It feels like the makers tried too hard with Feast, and the fun it could have been is sapped away in the process. Feast was followed by Feast II: Sloppy Seconds in 2008.
Related Links:
