Reviews

Feast

It’s official Project Green Light is canceled. If Feast was supposed to be their high mark of quality no one will be starting any petitions to bring it back. Almost a year has gone by since Affleck, Moore, and Damon gave John Gulager a chance to direct a feature film. The public was starting wonder if Feast would be released. Now the wait is over and Feast hits theaters on Friday… in select cities.

So here we go. Feast is a gimmicky low budget horror movie and it never tries to be anything more than that. No problem, who doesn’t love a bad horror movie?

Most movies that are all guts and no story take too long to get started. People start dying about ten minutes into Feast. All you have to do is get past the brief character introductions. New characters flash up on the screen every few seconds. They spout off a line or two then the screen freezes to show their stats. It was funny to see name, occupation, life expectancy, etc listed the first few times. It gets old quick. Then the bad ‘character stats’ joke gets recycled later on in the movie.

Speaking of jokes Feast is full of them. Some were actually funny. Most fell flat. The dialogue is just as fast as the pacing of the movie. Gags and/or blood fly about once a minute. Too bad middle school students wouldn’t laugh at most of them. Unless you find monster dong getting slammed in a door funny. How did the monster dong even get inside the doorframe? I should also add the phallus looks more like scrap latex and I wouldn’t have known what it was if it wasn’t spelled out.

That’s leads us to the biggest problem with Feast. The low budget limited what could have been an otherwise decent B-flick. Gulager actually does a good job directing. His direction style is almost like portrait photography, only set in a filthy bar. It actually looks really good. Some of the camera tricks, like following a shotgun slide across a floor, look great. Unfortunately anytime a monster is on screen the camera shakes out of control and it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. This has to be a result of a lack of funds for special effects. Well it sucks and pulled me right out of the viewing experience. After fight scenes I would look at my friend and ask, “What happened? Who got pulled out of the window?” I would ask and my friend always had the same answer, “This movie sucks.”

Look past the making of Feast, the jokes, the blood, the low budget and what’s left is a predictable horror movie. Feast “borrows” so heavily from already established horror films you’d be better off renting From Dusk Till Dawn. I’d rather watch a giant rat crawl out of Tom Savini than maggots crawl out of Judah Friedlander. Feast will only appeal to diehard horror fans but that’s to be expected.

You know what’s really sad? Even with all the negative things I have to say about Feast… it’s better than Black Dahlia. More entertaining anyway. I hope John Gulager has another chance to direct but this time with a genre better suited for him.

6.5/10
Andy

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