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Feast (2005)

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Overall Rating 64%
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Ranked #2,933
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Connections: Feast

In a remote bar, a newcomer advises the customers to seal the place up, as hungry monsters will soon attack them. The customers must quickly organize a strategy to defend themselves from the deadly creatures. --IMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: October 29, 2006
After the whole Miramax / Weinstein fiasco, I truly started to wonder if we'd ever get a chance to see this film, especially considering the fates of the first two entries in the Project Greenlight series. I'm not going to get into the details about all of that in this review (mainly because I'm pretty sure that anyone who cares already knows the story), but I will say that the final product was worth the wait... well, sort of.

When I write these reviews, I normally describe what takes place in the first twenty minutes of the film (give or take) so that you, the reader, sort of get an idea of what you're getting into when you pick the DVD up. With this review, I'm not going to go that route; instead, I'm simply going to tell you that there's a bar known as The Bear Tavern that is full of people from all walks of life, there are flesh-eating monsters outside, and the end result is about ninety minutes of gore-soaked mayhem. That's it. There is no complex plot to be found, no scientists lurking around to explain everything, no government agents popping in with the intention of covering everything up - just lots and lots (and lots) of monster-on-man brutality. There's thirteen main characters to be found inside this bar when all is said and done, and only three live... does that tell you anything?

First, the good. I really enjoyed the simplistic approach that director John Gulager took with his debut film. Sometimes, we just want to see some monster action without all of the seemingly-required explanations and back-stories that come with the majority of horror films today. Sure, it's nice to know what's going on at times, but it's refreshing to throw the logic and explanations out the window every now and again. Kudos to Gulager for knowing that he was making a monster film and not trying to turn it into some sort of three-hour epic explaining every last detail of the monsters and their origins.

Then we have the bloodshed. Yes, there is a lot of it, and you probably won't guess (correctly, anyway) which of the characters will make it out alive. You know how there's that laundry list of horror movie clichés that dictates who will live and who will die based solely on the character? You know exactly what I mean: the rude, obnoxious asshole will always die, the children will live, the hero or heroine is made obvious by the ten minute mark (either by their blatant "I'm the hero!" actions or their celebrity status), and a character is only there to "flesh out" the body count if they haven't spoken at least ten lines by the twenty minute mark. Well, you can throw all of that out the window - nobody is safe once the action picks up, and considering that the action picks up at around eight minutes in, well... there's plenty of time to die on this particular evening. Faces are ripped off, limbs are torn from their bodies, gallons of blood, pus and vomit are shed, eyes are plucked from skulls, and we even get to see a glorified skull-fucking. If that last item isn't worth the price of admission by itself, then I don't know what is.

Now, the only problem I had with this lies in the fact that it's a hybrid of horror and comedy. No, it's not a full-fledged horror/comedy as the main focus by far is the horror, but there are enough comedic moments thrown in that it goes beyond the normal witty one-liners and visual gags found in most "real" horror films such as this. Some of these scenes are actually pretty funny (such as the aforementioned skull-fucking scene, Jason Mewes as himself, and watching punk icon Henry Rollins prance around in pink sweatpants while giving motivational speeches), but others just kill the tension dead (no pun intended). For example, the opening of the movie features the humans trying to board up the bar before the monsters get in and kill everyone. People are dying and screaming, blood is everywhere, and everything is shown in manic, fast-paced shots. This is a great scene that is concluded with one of the monsters fucking a deer-head which is mounted on the wall (yes, there are a lot of fucking jokes). That would have been funny in, say, Critters 19, but it felt very out of place here. There are numerous other occurrences like that, and while it's not enough to turn me off to the film, I can't help but feel that this would have been leagues better as either a straight-forward horror flick (preferable) or a genuine horror/comedy.

Overlooking that one problem, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. If you're looking for a complex storyline or loads of details about the antagonists, look elsewhere; however, if you just want to see a simple man vs. monster film with people being torn apart left and right, you can't go wrong here. Besides, isn't that all we want sometimes? 8/10.
Christopher #1: Christopher - added December 31, 2006 at 2:26pm
It would have been much better if it wasn't so dark all the time. I also didn't enjoy the monsters putting on animal hides since we already knew what they looked like, via poster art. What was the surprise suppose to be? "Oh nos! He just ripped off his dead animal skeleton to reveal the face on the poster! SHOCKING!" The ten minute stats of each character at the beginning of the film was also very uncalled for. Fantastic action though, quite a bit managed to go on from the ten minute mark until the end in such a small bar.
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