For season 3, HBO apparently wasn’t interested in carrying the show anymore, so “Project Greenlight” was adopted by the folks at Bravo. Given their bad luck with the last two seasons, the boys decided to take a stab and focus this season’s movie on the horror genre, because as Stuart Gordon once had a friend tell him, “Horror movies are the best type of movies to make because they’re cheap and you’re guaranteed to make back whatever you spend on them”. Besides, if nothing else, The Attic Expeditions taught us that a million bucks can go a good long way if you’re creative, so there’s always hope. The winners of the script contest were a couple of college buddies, Patrick Melton (who looks kinda like a non-buff Christian Bale in this picture) and Marcus Dunstan (who looks kinda like that guy from “Ham on the Street” in this picture) who submitted the tale that has since become Feast. As for the director of this chancy third release from the show, the last man standing for the job was John Gulager. Oh, and just in case you were wondering if it’s a coincidence, it’s not: John is indeed the son of screen actor Clu “Return of the Living Dead” Gulager. Come on, you didn’t think that “Gulager” was the new “Smith” of Hollywood, did you?

I haven’t had genuine cable television service since 2003, so I haven’t seen the show myself. I read a few reviews and from the looks of it, it seems that the horror whore of Hollywood Wes Craven was brought in as a guest producer on the movie. Additionally, it also sounds as if he tried to give Mr. Gulager a few “suggestions” on how he should make the movie, of which Johnny Boy apparently blew off, opting instead to do it his way… despite not having any real game plan and preferring to run an a philosophy of “when I see it, I’ll know what it is that I want”… for which the man gets mad props, not only because I support his choice of doing whatever the fuck he wants to if that’s his vision, but also because Wes Craven is welcome to floss his teeth with my scraggly strands of scrotum hair, pretentious, pompous ass-plunger.

All personal vendettas aside, Feast was the result of “Project Greenlight”’s third and final season. Because of Bob and Harvey’s breaking away from Miramax, the movie was instead released under their independent studio The Weinstein Company: to a very limited theatrical release on September 22nd, 2006 and then almost immediately to DVD on October 17th, 2006. Was it any better than the show’s first two failures? More importantly, is it any better than the hundreds of time-waster, cookie-cutter, mind-numbing, hemorrhage inducing crap-a-palooza movies that sneak themselves onto rental shelves each year? We’ll see about that…

Feast is you basic budget saver submarine movie whose sole plot revolves around a cast of characters trapped in a bar and trying to survive a slumber party from Hell as they fend off vomit-spewing, cow skull wearing, sex crazed killer monsters. There’s no explanation to the creatures’ origins, there’s no reasoning behind why they dress in the hides and bones of dead animals, we just know that their child forms are sinister hump machines who rape everything from severed deer heads to human bombs, they eat their dead and re-spawn them almost immediately with a quick round of doggy-style and weird egg-sac birth thingy, they’re large and ugly and enjoy making meals our of homo sapiens. They might be vampires, they might be aliens, they might be a government super soldier product gone horribly wrong or they could just be a family of wayward Chupacabra on vacation. We’re never told what their deal is and, since there aren’t any guys in lab coats with thick rimmed glasses and messy shut-in scientist type hair, we shouldn’t expect an answer, so let’s just let that part go.

The cast is quite large for this type of movie and the characters all enjoyably generic. The checklist of clichés consists of the macho jerk-off bully pool shark guy, his wheelchair-bound brother with the whimsical nickname, the loser beer delivery guy with delusions of grandeur, the womanizing motivational speaker, the wise and weathered bartender, the old lady that seems to know more than she lets on, the military guy on leave who wears his fatigues everywhere he goes, the fat and cantankerous bar owner, the ditzy waitress with aspiration of being a Hollywood bombshell (despite the fact that she’s never been outside the East Bumblefuck city limits), the biker dyke looking for some illegal activity to partake in, the single mother who wants something better for her fatherless son but will never do anything with her life beyond waitressing and bending over for backdoor visits from her boss for an extra $20 a night, the token cult fav actor who gets a cameo because he’s the friend of the friend of one of the producers, and the heroic husband and wife couple who are there to save the world with an arsenal of one-liners and moves they learned while taking self-defense courses down at the YMCA on Thursday nights. There’s a little more depth to these characters though, thanks to the amusing way that each is introduced into the movie. As each finds their way onto screen, they’re given a freeze frame intro complete with their generic character name (“Bozo”, “Coach”, “Tuffy”, “Hero”, etc.), a quick little fun fact about each that eliminates the need for unnecessary character establishing dialogue later on when they’re standing around waiting to die, and the best part: a “Life Expectancy” rating that hints at how long we can expect to see each of these guys and gals in the movie. Here’s a hint: don’t believe these word for word, it’s just a joke.

Everybody winds up trapped in a bar in the middle of a desert wasteland on the worst possible night. The monsters descend upon our mix-and-match miscreants, spending the next 90 minutes or so trying to break through barricades of tables, doors and extra pieces of wood nailed over every entrance Night of the Living Dead style. Who will win and who will die? Will the monsters get their feast on and make a main course of these otherwise innocent bar patrons, or will the ingenuity of a posse of strangers low on ammo and without cell phone service be enough to save their asses till dawn? Will beer man survive being barfed on by corrosive stomach acids and a swarm of maggots? Will the bar’s owner be able to escape with his beard intact, despite getting accidentally shot in the foot? Will the single mother still be single (or a mother for that matter) by night’s end? Does the wheelchair bound gimp get his wish of seeing naked boobies before he dies? Can our hero and heroine live up to their titles? Will John Gulager live out some twisted oedipal cinematic fantasy and kill his own father (playing the bartender) for the sake of his movie!? These questions and more are answered if you just get off your ass and go buy/rent/borrow/steal a copy of Feast.

As far as the performances given to us by the cast and crew? That’s something I can discuss without too many pieces of hate mail giving my computer STDs for not putting up a spoiler alert. First, the writing. You know that Melton and Dunstan are horror fans and this is the type of thing they’ve been dreaming about since they first watched Evil Dead or From Dusk Till Dawn. The dialogue is intentionally cheesy, each character fills out their clichés to a proverbial ‘T’ and the introduction “profiles” were perfect. Despite being cast into broad character stereotypes though, these guys and gals actually have common sense going for them and manage to avoid a lot of those “wearing high heels while running through the woods” moments that have led to so many fodder characters being tuned inside-out over the years. I also got a little fanboy tingle from one particular scene, as the macho jerk-off, desperate to know what’s going on with these creatures, interrogates the old lady of the group, saying that old people like her “know legends and stuff”. But, instead of throwing some kind of bullshit exposition in our faces with such a simple plot device, we’re left in the dark to fend for ourselves as she blows the prick off and insists that she doesn’t know anything about what’s going on. Beautiful. These guys are letting their horror geek flags fly, but you can also tell that they’re not fond of the overbearing horror geek-turned-moviemaker types who go around carelessly dick slapping viewers in the face with their sore covered horror cocks, spewing their infectious diseases in their movies, leaving the dialogue and sets dripping with stinky, congealed remnants of their geekitude without a care in the world… I’m looking at you, The Dead Hate the Living!

John Gulager does a good job in his directorial debut, but he needs to get over the amateur act of abusing the shaky cam. I understand if you’re trying to hide your low-budget special effects and fight choreography by moving your camera around a lot and obstructing your audience’s view, but if you need to overdue it to the point that it looks like your camera operators have advanced cases of Parkinson’s, maybe you should find another way to “convey your vision”. Then again, even big budget blockbusters like Batman Begins abused the shaky-cam, so maybe it’s less a diversion tactic and more a lame trend in trying to make movies look “cooler”, like Bullet Time. Meh. Maybe we’ll see an improvement in John-Boy’s next effort.

The gore and make-up effects were good for the most part. Blood was spewing everywhere and it was done rather well. The monster’s aren’t the best I’ve ever seen and come off looking like the genetically inferior offspring of the Flukeman when their cow skull masks come off, but they weren’t the worst things I’ve ever seen. I definitely could’ve done without the little ones’ “mouthful of monster chowder” scene and the castration of the big poppa beastie though. Blargh. Gross out gags that revolt rather than entertain. Blargh, blargh and blargh again.

As far as the acting is concerned, I’ve got a pocketful of kudos and I brought enough for everyone! I just hope you like chocolate chip and peanut butter, cuz that’s the only kind I could find… Balthazar Getty fit snuggly into his role as the a-hole like it was a Christmas sweater knit for him by his granny. Henry Rollins (and his pink sweatpants) are great as the motivational speaker, because Rollins is well spoken and intense enough to make me believe he actually is a motivational speaker! Hell, if he came out with his own seminar, I’d attend! Clu Gulager, though he only got the part because he’s the director’s dad, was well cast as the cool-headed voice of wisdom for the group and that’s just what someone wants out of their bartender. Duane Whitaker is serviceably skeevy as the big hairy dickhead bar owner and earns his paycheck. Former Naughty By Nature member Anthony ‘Treach’ Criss plays the off-duty military man Vet and… well… of his role, let’s just say that I haven’t quite seen enough to know whether or not I could say the man knows how to act. My only major complaint is for Judah Friedlander who plays our dirty decaying Coors Light guy. He’s got some decent lines, he plays creepy and pathetic well, but if you hated the guy going into the movies, this role is only going to strengthen that. I would rather have seen Kevin Smith mainstay and Ben Affleck fluffer Jason Mewes’ character (himself, the most difficult role of his career I’m told) continue on as the group’s do-nothing loser instead of Friedlander, but we can’t always get what we want, right?

In summary, Feast was a good way to burn a couple hours. If it weren't trying to fill the footsteps of such similar genre greats at From Dusk Till Dawn and Demon Knight, I probably would have scored it higher, but in the shadow of some of my personal favs, they already had a hard hurdle ahead of them. Gulager, Melton and Dunstan all have potential, with the latter two currently taking the writing reins for Saw IV and a similarly themed “booby trapped house” type of movie called The Midnight Man. My crystal balls need to be polished (my usually servicing wench is off this week for Osiris’ birthday), so I can’t exactly peek into the future for either, but for the time being I’m keeping my fingers crossed for their success. Then again, I said the same thing about the Hillenbrand brothers after seeing King Cobra back in ’99 and all I’ve seen out of them since are a couple of DTV National Lampoon movies and the forgettable Jamie Pressly tropical horror flick Piñata: Survival Island, so what the fuck do I know? Bah, just ignore me while I go over here and drink some paint thinner… at least paint thinner never judges me or let’s me down… sweet sweet paint thinner… which I like to call “pain thinner”… my only friend… :::whimper:::