Bon Appetit: Feast Mode!

What is November, without a Feast!  The winner of the third season of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Project Greenlight, Feast is a quirky horror comedy.  At a hole in the wall bar in the middle of no-where, a group of patrons are drowning their sorrows.  As each character is introduced, their name, some stats, and projected life expectancy are displayed.  A stranger (Name: Hero, occupation: Kicking Ass, Life Expectancy: Pretty Fucking Good) runs in covered in blood.  He carries a warning of impending doom as hell is about to befall on their little tavern.   Monsters are on their way.  No one believes him until he throws the head of one of them on to the bar.  A child monster gets in and Hero is killed almost immediately.  This is where we find out that each character’s “stats” bar, isn’t necessarily prophetic.  Enter Heroine, Hero’s wife, who starts kicking some ass!.  The monster is trapped in a freezer and the surviving group of patrons regroup to try figure out a way to survive the remaining monsters without killing each other.

As the evening progresses the group fights of several attacks from the creatures losing several of their comrades.  The remaining patrons and staff of the bar, come up with a final plan to escape, which does not work and Heroine is killed in the process.  Grieving mother, Tuffy, whose son was eaten by the monsters earlier in the film, takes charge and is renamed “Heroine 2”.  A final battle ensues with four surviving the night.

The movie is fun with it’s quirky introduction of characters.  One of the things that makes this movie different, is that it isn’t predictable and does not follow the normal rules of horror.  No one is safe from being killed off.  There are certain archetypes that you normally expect to survive, but don’t. The Hero is the first to go and a young child is killed near the beginning, which is usually taboo in horror films.  The Heroine, trying to get back to her daughter, does not make it, and the Town Jackass survives without being redeemed first.  One-character escapes and doesn’t come back to save them like you would expect.   People are sacrificed while still alive and others are shot on accident.  Although the plot is simple, group of people trying to survive and not be eaten by veracious monsters, the fact that no one is safe from either monsters or humans keeps the otherwise cookie-cutter movie exciting.

The acting, on a whole, is good and the story flows well with plenty of action and suspense, but the attack scenes are a little too frantic, with it being difficult to see what is actually happening.  Some of the plot points get run over by the action without really giving the audience time to comprehend what is happening.  The quirky gimmick of showing each character’s stats is fun and novel, but the dialogue feels forced sometimes and the writing is clunky and a bit juvenile. This movie dips into the straight boy fantasy realm.  For example, In the middle of a monster attack, while a waitress is cleaning the blood off her boobs, she begins to undress, to the delight of a couple of the male characters,  like wise, the Monsters are hungry and horny and seem to eat or try to have sex with everything, much like pubescent teenage boys.  It may be the changing times, but I remember enjoying this movie in 2005, but watching it again, the overly masculinization in some of the scenes was a little distasteful.