Eberts Thumb

From the makers of Good Will Hunting

If you liked From Dusk til Dawn, but didn't like the first half with all the character development, the vampires, or Mexicans, then Feast is for you. Instead of spending 45 minutes telling the back story of the characters, Feast gives all the characters 30 seconds to give you the gist of who they are, then we get to read the their bio in 10 seconds. Feast throws a lot of characters at you as it goes around the bar, so don't fell bad if you can't remember everyone's name since they don't use them again. After throwing all the characters at you, they throw in the situation, and the movie goes from there.

The situation is that a dozen or so rednecks in a dive bar in the middle of nowhere have to defend themselves from a pack of aliens or mutants or something (what they are isn't explained). Every once in a while the group tries something and they lose someone, but mostly its the survivors bickering on what to do next.

This movie was the result of a season of Project Greenlight season 3. It probably would have added to the movie to have watched Project Greenlight, but not seeing it doesn't take away from the movie.

Feast doesn't do anything much different from other horror movies, but it does things better. The acting is good, the production values are decent, and it has Jason Mewes as himself. Definitely give Feast a watch.

Eberts Thumb's Ratings
Entertainment: 95%	B-Movieness: 30%
Quality: 80%	Regret: 5%

El Chupacabra

Puts some clichés to bloody and spectatcular rest

Feast was quite an enjoybale little yarn and was done on a small budget to boot, demonstrating that good entertainment doesn't need a $200 million dollar budget and a single strand of hair from the head of Jerry Bruckheimer. The approach that many movies with a small budget, but a competent writer, director and cast take is to somehow severely limit the location of the movie to a single structure or room. In the case of Saw (NOT Saw II, Saw III, or god forbid, Saw 4), the majority of action was confined to a single room containing just two people. Despite this limited scope, the movie largely succeeded because the two respective actors effectively transfered a true sense of suspense and bewilderement. Another example is the movie Treed Murray, which was set mainly in and around a large tree, and yet it was at times frightening and disturbing. I'm not saying Saw and Treed Murray were Oscar contenders, but they show that low budget does not always have to equal a bad movie. There are ways to get around lack of funds from operational items such as cheap catering and talented, but lesser know actors and actresses to structural items like scripts that work within a narrower geographic scope.

A further implication of this narrowed scope can be illustrated by an actual Oscar contender, the Hitchcock classic Lifeboat. As the title suggests, Lifeboat takes place on a lifeboat where "several survivors of a torpedoed ship find themselves in the same boat with one of the men who sunk it." The idea is that when the geographic scope is reduced, the corresponding  exposition and analysis of humanity and morality can be widened. People and their relationships with one another become the main focus.

Okay, enough with the B-movie academics. Feast didn't quite give us a glimpse into the human soul, but it did answer the question of what a seedy bar full of widely disparate people would do when faced with an outside force of flesh-eating, saw-toothed creatures. The enitre movie took place within a two-story, dillapidated drinking hole somewhere out along a desert highway. The story builds up the characters quickly with an almost comic book style panel of biographical information and the character's life expectancy. The movie really gets going when a stereotypcially hero-like square-jawed, attractive man covered in blood, out of breath, and holding a shotgun bursts into the bar and tells everyone that if they want to live the night, they'll have to follow everything he says. It's the usual clichéd line and he's quickly identified as the protagonist; his name is in fact "Hero". Okay, this is standard, sausage factory survival horror stuff, right? Well, right for some things and dead wrong for others. From that moment on, the movie makers begin to make departures from movie norms, and break some long held movie conventions along the way. Conventions about such things as the standard role of the hero and heroine, and the survivability of quiet, sweet and well-behaved child, conventions that we probably all took for granted. We are so used to the same archetypes and unwritten movie norms that some things this movie does are disturbing while at the same time refreshing. At first you feel lost, confused and afraid because you're in unknown territory, the film-makers have broken "the rules" and you can't see a clear path to a happy ending. Your safety blanket of clichés, your expectations that the hero triumphs over evil while looking dashing and flashing nice, straight, white teeth, are quickly ripped away from you. But, then you start to enjoy it and betting on who lives and who dies actually becomes a challenging and entertaining prospect.

A couple of other things are worth mentioning. The monsters in this movie are well done. They are weird, viscious, and unrelenting. The acting never detracts from the movie and many roles are played entertainingly. I mean, Henry Rollins as a motivational speaker? Who would of thought. Be warned that no explanation or backstory for the creature's sudden arrival or existence is offered, but I am forgiving of this because if a movie is a window on to a discrete span of time, then backstory becomes irrelevant. This mainly applies to movies that recreate natural disasters or other hisotorically oriented events. Lastly, it was a shame that the local video store only had one copy of this movie and 20 copies of Seagal's Attack Force . Not to knock Seagal, but this movie should have at least equalled that count. 

El Chupacabra's Ratings
Entertainment: 89%	B-Movieness: 23%
Quality: 76%	Regret: 2%

Charles Bronson

MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT DAAAAAAAAMON

Charles Bronson's Ratings
Entertainment: 75%	B-Movieness: 15%
Quality: 85%	Regret: 20%

Crap Bag

Isn't that the guy from jay and slient bob?

Quite the enjoyable movie with a surprisingly decent cast.  Some pretty intreesting death scenes coupled with a different twist on the typical humans vs monsters scenario.  The ones you don't think are going to die last the longest, people least likly to die tend to be the first.  Probably the worst death was getting leg cut off, being presumed death, being turned into a bomb, still being alive, getting humped by a baby monster then getting blow up.  If this movie did not deserve a slow clap I don't know what does.

Crap Bag's Ratings
Entertainment: 80%	B-Movieness: 15%
Quality: 80%	Regret: 15%

Kibakichi's Final Word

Not human wang... Alien wang!