Feast B-Movie Review

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FEAST -

Unrated

Reviewed by Andrew Borntreger on 20 January 2007

The Characters:

Tuffy (AKA Heroine #2) - Currently looking for a new daddy and a new baby (she already has a good lead on the latter).
Bozo & Hot Wheels - These two brothers are perfectly willing to inflict major verbal or minor physical abuse on each other, but stop short of wishing a bloody death on their sibling. Sounds normal to me.
Heroine - I think that she dealt with her husband's demise rather well. Shot, falls out a window, and munched.
Coach - Annoying motivational speakers must die.
Honey Pie - I was pleased that I avoided cracking a "dizzy blonde" joke until the very end.
Beer Guy - This guy has the worst day of his miserable life. It ends when a monster smashes his skull.
Harley Mom - She looks tough, but remove one leg below the knee and duct tape her to a travois and she is easy monster pickings.
Jason Mewes, Vet, Tuffy's Son, & Hero - Nothing establishes the fact that monsters are a real menace like a plethora of victims. Maybe "Hero" should be preceded by "temporary."
Boss Man - Toby Keith? Well, he is dead, anyway.
Grandma & Bartender - More fodder, but they hang on for quite a while. I was sorry to see the bartender go.
The Monsters - Fearsome demons that can reproduce instantly. They are tough to kill, except that their heads come off easily. I have no idea what they are or where they came from; take your pick of possible explanations.

The Plot:

Any number of modern direct-to-video and low budget productions suffer from being too self aware. The writers or directors know what they are making. To prove this, they include some form of acknowledgement, whether it is an exchange between two characters or a prominent b-movie poster in the background. Most of the time, I would prefer it if the film makers went ahead and made their movie without worrying about some Internet critic claiming, "These people did not know they were in a b-movie!" In the case of "Feast," they found a creative and entertaining way to introduce the cast and play with the genre. Each character is shown for a few moments, before the scene freezes and a description is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Not only are these insightful, some are drop dead funny. The life expectancy for the Hero caused to me laugh and skip backwards to see it again.

The setting is a dusty bar along a lonely stretch of desert highway. It looks like any other night in the place, with unhappy regulars and unhappy passers-through struggling to suppress enough of their normal anti-social behaviors to get along. That is, until the Hero bursts in the door. His sudden appearance, covered in blood and holding a shotgun, startles the Bartender enough to brandish The Judge (double-barrel shotguns deserve a fitting nickname). Without blinking an eye, the Hero tells them that he is not a threat, what is headed toward the bar is the real danger. To make his point, the Hero drops a monster's head onto the bar. Nothing grabs people's attention like a maw full of nasty teeth.

Hero grabs a beer and moves over near a window to look for the other demons. Now, hanging out near a window is always a no-no in movies like this, but the hero or other important characters can usually get away with it. This guy does not. The window bursts in and something pulls Hero partially outside. When his body slumps to the floor, his head is missing. Actually, this first attack scene turns into complete pandemonium for several minutes. Everyone is freaking out, Heroine bursts in looking for her husband (ah, that would be the headless corpse on the floor), a small monster gets loose in the bar, and an accidental discharge puts a hole in the ceiling and Boss Man's foot (he was upstairs, with Tuffy). Believe it or not, that is not everything that happens during the five minutes of chaos. Jason Mewes loses his face, Harley Mom loses her leg below the knee, and Vet has a hole clawed through his chest.

Oh, and the phone is blasted to smithereens. Welcome to Anarchy, TX. Population: fifte...twelve.

Soon as you think it is safe to breathe again, Tuffy remembers that her son is alone upstairs. She runs up there and panics until she finds him. Unfortunately, she passes too close to an open window on her way out of the room. The boy is ripped from Tuffy's embrace and quickly gobbled by one of the creatures. Beer Guy stands in the door, horrified. Not satisfied with traumatizing the single mom (well, she was a single mom), the monster douses Beer Guy with a pressurized stream of vomit that looks to be mostly stomach acid with a sprinkling of maggots. Then, as the miserable human scrambles to his feet, the monster does it again.

If someone had once told me that I would laugh at seeing a Beer Guy sprayed by several gallons of liquefied ten-year-old, I probably would not have believed them. Young people think they know it all.

The Heroine takes charge of the situation and motivates the other characters to barricade the doors and windows. The bodies are gathered up and put in the basement. The Heroine also settles down Beer Guy when he freaks out. No, she does not talk to him; when the hysterical man tries to push past her, she executes a respectable shoulder throw and holds a knife against his throat until he finally chills out.

With the bar secure, the group's attention turns to the little monster. It was captured inside a small cooler during the fracas, but is now growing impatient. Boss Man thinks that he solves the problem with his revolver. Nope, the mean pygmy grabs his leg through a hole in the side. At this point, Tuffy grabs The Judge and turns baby monster into corned beef hash. The dead creature gives Coach an idea. Maybe, if the humans can prove that they are not easy prey, the monsters will leave them alone. He picks up the carcass and shoves it out a window. An adult monster inspects the dead baby, then eats it. What the heck? How much does it take for these things to be full? Anyway, the trapped patrons watch with no small amount of sick interest as two of the demons outside have sex (and set off a car alarm doing it). The female monster gives birth to twins within seconds. Geez, that was so fast that it made instant oatmeal look slow.

Remember Beer Guy? While all of this occurs, the poor guy has been suffering some ill effects from being exposed to unknown digestive fluids. His hair is coming out in clumps and his skin develops a pasty look. The idiot makes a stupid mistake by looking out through a hole in the boards covering a window. One of the new little monsters rips out his eye in a scene that goes on for an agonizingly long time. The new injury also sprays Honey Pie with blood, again (she was pretty well soaked earlier).

I mentioned earlier about the phone being destroyed. In order to summon help, because cell phones get no service in the bar, Boss Man volunteers that he has a short wave radio in his room. Why is the only key or communications device somewhere that the monster can also be lurking? Bozo goes upstairs to find the radio and place a distress call. He manages to scream into the microphone for a few seconds before the radio is ripped away. With a monster close behind, the young man makes a wild dash for the hallway. The others were waiting outside the room and slam the door shut just in time. Disastrously, for the pursuing demon's sex life, its tallywacker and bits are caught by the closing door. Heroine seizes the opportunity to geld the monster with a handy machete. OW! OW! OW! OW! OW!

Realizing that somehow, somebody needs to escape and find help, the surviving humans hatch a plan. They will rig one of the bodies with makeshift explosives (aerosol cans, flammable liquor, etc.) and offer it to the monsters as bait. While the creatures are distracted, Coach and the Heroine will climb out a basement window and bring Boss Man's truck to the door. Not too bad of a plan, as these things go. They even pick a good "corpse" to be the bait, because Harley Mom Bomb has a certain ring to it. Where it all goes wrong is that Harley Mom is not dead. She wakes up as Bozo and Boss Man are moving her toward an open window on the second story. A short struggle over ethics ensues, which is interrupted by the two little beasts snatching the unlucky woman out of the window. Quite helpless from all the duct tape, she finds herself dragged away from the building. Considering what the little devils are doing to her, Harley Mom is probably thankful when the bombs go off.

Coach and Heroine did not manage to reach the truck. She attempts to reenter the building through the same window that Harley Mom exited, but startles Bozo. What usually happens in these situations is the secondary character discharges their firearm and puts a hole in the window frame mere inches from the heroine's head. Not so in this case. Bozo shoots her in the chest, looking on in stunned disbelief (and she looks back) as the Heroine falls backwards and tumbles to the ground below. The monsters hear their dinner bell and come running. We next see Coach when the demons start their last assault on the bar. The fiends use him as a battering ram to crack open the front door. It is time for the final bloody confrontation between human and monster. Watch as Tuffy goes ape crazy beating one monster in the face with the butt of the shotgun.

The monster design was plenty vicious looking, with their mouthful of needle-like teeth and sinewy bodies. However, in some ways, it was a letdown from my first impressions. Except for the head brought in by the Hero, the monsters are covered in layers of rotting animal hides and bones. They appear to be misshapen creatures, with the same mass as a cow or some other big animal. Tuffy's son being swallowed whole by a monster like that makes some sort of sense, not entirely true when they are gaunt bipeds. To be honest, the monsters are presented unevenly. An immature specimen cleanly severs Harley Mom's leg, while an adult is unable to punch through the cheap plywood shutters over a window.

I have to wonder what caused the writers to subject the Beer Guy to everything they did. He was so miserable that, several times, I begged for the script to show him mercy. Well, that or a quick death.

Things I Learned From This Movie:

Never play pool against someone who is wet or greasy.
It is possible to miss with a double-barrel shotgun at close range.
Foosball tables make handy barricades.
The human eyeball is anchored to the skull by two feet of tendon.
Remember, there is a reason nobody ever tries the old "foot in the door" trick with their genitals.
When all else fails, use duct tape and scissors.
Never lay on the floor, even if the creatures are not huge worms.
All-night bars should be constructed of rebar-reinforced concrete, with steel shutters, redundant communications equipment, backup power, and extensive medical supplies. Patrons should BYOSG (bring your own shotgun).

Stuff To Watch For:

1 min - Say hello to tomorrow's hamburger.
9 mins - Kid, you get gypped.
21 mins - Well, now you have a few extra years to save money for your child's college tuition.
42 mins - There is a mime joke hiding from me in plain sight.
44 mins - No weapon? Not even a broken bottle? Never mind, he has "The Judge."
49 mins - Ouch.
60 mins - You are hating it.
69 mins - That is quite the inspirational battering ram.
77 mins - Knocking the monster's teeth out so she can shove her entire arm down its throat and choke it to death, before pulling out a handful of gizzards = Tuffy working out some issues concerning her ex?

Quotes:

Hero: "Listen to me. A storm of Hell's coming down on this place any second."
Boss Man: "I don't care! Go suffer somewhere else!"

Audio clips in wav format

SOUNDS

Starving actors speak out

	File	Dialog
	feast1.wav	Coach: "But what we need to do is think outside the box. We don't need to fight them. We need to scare them. We need to scare them back. This is a species standoff."
	feast2.wav	(Monster roar and munching sounds.) Beer Guy: "Holy shit, she ate it. She didn't even chew, man, she just swallowed it."
	feast3.wav	Bozo: "Who else is coming?" Grandma: "I'll go with ya." Bozo: "What are you going to do, throw your teeth at 'em? Just, sit down, cocoon."
	feast4.wav	Hot Wheels: "Well, they want to eat us, right?" Heroine: "Yeah." Hot Wheels: "Let's give 'em something to eat."

Click for a larger image

IMAGES

Scenes from the movie

Watch a scene

VIDEO

MPEG video files

	feast1.mpg - 3.1m
	Tuffy's son is pulled from her arms and swallowed whole, then several gallons of liquefied ten-year-old and digestive juices are projectile vomited at Beer Guy. It is always funnier the second time.