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STUDIO: Dimension
MSRP: $29.98
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 92 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Commentary
- Deleted scenes
- FX Featurette
- "Making of"
The Pitch
"Creatures who enjoy eating people are waiting patiently outside to eat the patrons of a bar in the middle of nowhere. Except they ain’t patient."
The Humans
Navi Rawat. Clu Gulager. Henry Rollins. Balthazar Getty. Krista Allen. Jenny Wade. Judah Friedlander. Eric Dane. Duane Whitaker. Jason Mewes.
Every poet needs his Mewes.
The Nutshell
The Project Greenlight horror flick, fresh from the dumbest theatrical release effort since Equilibrium, arrives on video with attitude to spare in a lean and mean unrated edition. This film could have cleaned up if they gave it the theatrical run crappy flicks like Stay Alive or Pulse get. It didn’t get that release, so people will now see a film about vicious man-eating creatures, plentiful killing of characters you’d expect to survive, and a nice bit of blood-soaked mayhem.
Suzy took her family’s sessions of Carrie Charades very seriously.
The Lowdown
A lot of people compare John Gulager’s Feast to From
Dusk Til Dawn, but I owe it more kinship to Tales from the Crypt: Demon
Knight which coming from me is a complement. Granted, you can count
the films about a siege and a standoff on a few dozen fingers, so it’s not like
Feast
is trying to pave new territory. In fact it’s Feast’s acceptance of its
place in its chosen genre that makes it somewhat irresistible. The film gladly
walks among the films mentioned above as well as The Evil Dead 2, Re-Animator,
and Braindead/Dead
Alive, choosing to send buckets of blood and grue towards the screen
doused heavily with laughter instead of the pseudo disturbing stuff being
unloaded at us these days. If I never see another pale Japanese kid shifting across the screen it’ll be too soon. Demon Knight‘s kind of the red-headed stepchild of the post-Raimi horror era, a flick people dismiss without really appreciating the gore and Billy Zane’s amazing performance and I think Feast travels in a similar pattern. From Dusk til Dawn, for all its fun moments, feels disingenuous. This flick knows exactly what it wants to be and has a blast adhering to some conventions and gleefully pissing on the others.
And that’s why Bambi’s face got pregnant.
The paper thin premise and juggling of lead characters all adds to the fun. You’re never sure who’s going to get eaten next and it’s nice knowing that just because you have the best intentions it doesn’t mean you’ll be spared and that it’s ok to be a prick and still live. While the idea of turning an idea on its ear simply for shock value is pointless, writers Marcus Dustan and Patrick Melton have done a nice job of working within a restricting format. The film is lean and mean and though the balance of humor and horror sometimes veers too much on the former, Feast joins flicks like the ones mentioned above and Deep Rising and Night of the Creeps as a great way to spend a late night with good people and good spirits.
It’s also nice to see Henry Rollins stripped of his considerable toughness as a total wuss, Balthazar Getty in semi-leading man mode (I love the guy, always have), and a trio of talented and stunning ladies balancing hard to acheive comedy and physical action without missing a beat.
Never tell the hearing impaired to fix the hole in the floor with glue.
I haven’t seen the controversial last season of Project Greenlight that led to this film, and thanks to boneheaded home video strategy by Bravo/Miramax, who knows when I will.
Stripped of that gimmick, Feast still works. It’s still fun. It’s still creative. It’s still one of the better horror releases in recent memory and that’s the best thing you can hope for coming from a series that is better at being entertaining in its own right than for making good movies. This is by far a better product than Stolen Summer and The Battle of Shaker Heights and John Gulager has a bright future ahead of him as a horror icon if someone gives him the chance to build on this.
Buy this flick and add it to your midnight stupor film festivals reserved for your most special sicko friends. It’s that kind of good time.
The Package
I was a little surprised not to see the origin sequence they shot for this film’s creatures, something alluded to in the trailers. Regardless of how good or bad it may be, it’d have been a nice inclusion. There are some deleted scenes (or Lifted Scenes in Kasdanspeak), a few of which I was glad to see removed and a few who’d have fit in just fine. I think the scene where Krista Allen talks to her son in the freezer room would have disrupted the tone for sure. Still, I wanted more monster stuff.
The commentary is good, though crowded. It would have been wiser to allow Gulager his own track, because he apparently had a lot to get off his chest. It’s fun though, a solid compliment to the flick and I’d imagine it carries even more value to folks who have seen the series. The featurettes are solid as well. Here’s hoping they release the series soon with an even beefier version of this disc because it’s a nice edition but I can’t help but feel it’s a little rushed even though the film languised for no small amount of time.
I was a bit icked out to discover on the commentary that that found a dead dog on the side of the road and used it in the opening credits. Just think, some guy is writing signs in magic marker to find our where his pooch Funyuns is and he pops in Feast and subsequently assassinates himself in grief.
8.0 out of 10