Feast (2005)

	Director: John Gulager
	Starring: Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat
	Run Time: 95 mins
	Certificate: 18
	Rating:

Plot
A motley group of strangers find themselves trapped in an isolated tavern and must band together to fight off a family of flesh-eating monsters.

Review
With a plot that has been done to death time and time again, your typical low budget horror film cast with a few recognisable names and the fact that Wes Craven is an executive producer, Feast doesn't exactly set itself up to bat with great poise. The opening few minutes reek of a director desperately trying to make his film stand out from the crowd with the mini-bios of each character and their odds of surviving the night appearing during a freeze frame of each patron. Stereotypes are played up with the ditzy barmaid, the hick owner, grizzled barman and a variety of stock characters peppering the bar. You know that the film is going to be by-the-book but you're unsure by how much. However the moment the "hero" bursts through the doors of the tavern to warn everyone of the coming danger, the rules go straight out of the window and Feast turns into one of the best damned gore-fests I've seen in a long time. No character is safe. No subject is too taboo. Nothing will go the way it should go. Just sit back and enjoy the ride because it's going to be fast and frenetic.

It's quite hard to review this film and not give away too much because half of the fun in Feast is actually waiting to see what happens to which character. Believe me there are a lot of unexpected twists and turns. Every genre cliché is battered around. Just when you think the film is heading in one direction, the rug is pulled from underneath you. And then just as you start to get to your feet, the rug is pulled out again. It's a relentless ride of twists and it's a great credit to the writers that they manage to keep everything as entertaining at the end as they did at the beginning. The film does start to lose steam half-way through as there's only so many logical twists and turns that the film can take before it becomes tiring and because it throws everything but the kitchen sink into the opening half, there's not a lot else left to do but repeat. But by that point it doesn't really matter because the blood and gore is flowing freely. The deaths are all violent, gruesome and frequent! There is a pretty big group of people to thin out at the beginning and the film wastes little time in getting rid of most of them early on. Apart from one or two cuts and jumps to other scenes, most of the deaths are shown in all of their gory glory.

The other great thing is that the film has a very wicked sense of humour to go along with the shocking twists. From the monsters humping everything and everyone in sight (I'll let you find out for yourselves) to the almost computer-game like names of the characters (Honey Pie, Boss Man, Hot Wheels, etc), there's nothing too goofy or silly to be included. Does it harm the film? Yes and no. If you're looking for serious then look elsewhere. But if you're in the mood for one of those "switch off your brain" flicks then this is right down your alley. Henry Rollins has a few of the best moments of the film as the motivational speaker who needs to change his trousers when they are ripped during an attack and is stuck wearing a pair of pink tights for the bulk of the film. The rest of the acting isn't particularly bad, nor is it memorable - the characters are all slightly more dimensional than they have right to be but there's not exactly much in the way of quality. The other positive is that there's no real main character and a lot of the supporting characters get equal screen time. This is one occasion when not having a lead character to dominate the screen helps the "group sticks together" mentality. The monsters themselves do get a lot of personality traits (especially the more amorous younger creature!) but are rarely glimpsed in full, confined to the shadows or edited in such a way as to avoid revealing what they really are. I guess it wouldn't have hurt to let us know just what these things were but sometimes less is more. So the less we know about why they are there, the more we worry about what they are going to do whilst they're there!

Verdict
Feast is a true feast of horror and comedy. It's insane from the start and doesn't let go. The best way I can describe it is From Dusk Till Dawn meets Night of the Living Dead on steroids! It doesn't break the rules, it throws them away and does what it wants to do, when it wants to do it. There's not too many films that I can say have done that recently.