Feast (2005) took a tortuous path to DVD. It was actually the third Project Greenlight-produced movie. I guess Matt Damon and Ben Affleck must have finally realized, after producing two coming-of-age stories no one saw, that no one goes to see coming-of-age stories. A horror movie would seem to be a much better commercial prospect, and probably more fun to watch on Greenlight. It didn’t work out that way, though, as Bravo canceled Project Greenlight early and the movie ended up on the shelf for a year.
The movie is an interesting first film for director John Gulager. The story is pure “Spam in a Cabin,” with a group of people (identified by onscreen mini-bios when they first appear) trapped in a honky tonk bar that’s under siege by a family of slimy creatures that are hell bent on eating as many human beings as possible. The creatures also have a nasty variety of ways of killing people, including ripping them apart and vomiting maggots and acid on them. In fact, the characters are more defined by how they die than anything they do in life.
Going against the grain of this kind of film, there is no explanation as to what the monsters are. Aliens? Mutants? Something else? There are no scientists or ex-secret agents to explain what’s going on. Oddly, the trailer for Feast suggests the monsters are some sort of bio-weapon cooked up by the U.S. military, but that makes little sense and was probably cooked up by some nervous marketing executive afraid that the movie needed some sort of label.
Comparing this hyper-gory and occasionally funny movie to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead (1981) is probably inevitable, though there’s quite a few scenes in the movie I found unacceptably disgusting, cutting down on my enjoyment. Maybe Evil Dead had some material that was that extreme that I’m able to gloss over now (the tree scene comes to mind), but I think I would have enjoyed the film more if it had had lot less.
