Feast (John Gulager)
A few years ago, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the two actors who hit it big when their screenplay
Good Will Hunting was produced and eventually brought them Oscar gold, decided to help other unproduced screenwriters. They started
"Project Greenlight", which was a contest and a television show where a screenplay would be chosen, finaced and made into a feature film to be distributed theatrically by Miramax. The cameras of the show caught all the goings on, and the end result would be opportunities for young writers and directors to show what they could do and realize their dreams. The first two
"Greenlight" movies were
Stolen Summer (2002) and
The Battle of Shaker Heights (2003). They were nice enough and competent if uninspired little dramedies, but neither one made any money. The Weinsteins had been footing the bill for Ben & Matt's enterprise, and they decided that if the third film out of
"Project Greenlight" didn't make some waves at the box office, the show - as nice an idea as it was - had to go. Faced with this they decided to turn their attention to a genre effort that would have a fighting chance at putting some butts into seats. They enlisted Wes Craven as a producer and to help with the selection process, then they went looking for a Horror movie. And here it is...
Feast is a low-budget gorefest tinged with dark comedy in the
Evil Dead 2 mode about a small group of folks in a remote desert diner battling flesh eating monsters one fateful night. It's full of the self-conscious 'we've all seen this movie a dozen times already but isn't it fun anyway?' nods to the audience that has become fairly standard practice. Some of it works, some of it falls flatter than gags in
Scary Movie 3. The characters all have names like The Hero, The Bartender, The Bossman and Beer Guy, and the script tries to play with the expectations of the genre as who will go first and who will survive (though it seems to me all these "rules" have been commented upon and broken many times over by now in the post-
Scream era). Our ever-shrinking cast of walking meals include Balthazar Getty (
Lost Highway), Krista Allen (
"Unscripted"), ex-rocker Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes (
Clerks), comedian Judah Friedlander and veteran character actor Clu Gulager (those who saw any of
"Greenlight 3" know the director of the film is Clu's son, John). The monsters are slimy and hungry and it only takes about twelve minutes before people are getting torn apart. I'm not a huge fan of the Horror genre, but for as small and sometimes obvious as
Feast is, it does deliver enough of the requisite blood and a few chuckles in its blissfully brisk 80-some-minute running time. It's not great, it's certainly not anything new, but if you're looking for one of these kinds of flicks as Halloween approaches I suppose one could do worse.
As far as making a pile of cash, I fear this is the bloody end of
"Project Greenlight" (where the behind-the-scenes aspect of the series, seeing the filmmakers struggle to get their film made, was the real hook anyway and the movies themselves an afterthought). At least they went out shotguns blazing.
GRADES: "Project Greenlight 3", B and
Feast, C-
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