FEAST

In a bar lost in the desert lands of America, a man armed and covered in blood bursts in, alarming the customers: a group of monstrous creatures is chasing him and will soon arrive there. Just enough time to be taken for crazy and a little monster enters the place causing a massacre. It's only the beginning of a long night of survival. In recent years, the contamination between horror, humor, and action has been at the center of a significant number of productions, more or less important (latest example: "Zombieland"), more or less successful, but rarely able to impose themselves as true cults capable of being remembered by genre enthusiasts. In most cases, the alchemy doesn't work too well, there's always an element that clashes, that prevails over the others, an intruder thrown in just to ride the wave. Among the rare examples of recent perfect synchronization of the aforementioned components, we can certainly find "Feast," a low-budget horror film (just over 3 million dollars) born as a surprise from a contest project that sees Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as financiers. The two actors, in fact, produced, together with Wes Craven, the Weinstein brothers, and a dozen other names, a film that had as screenwriters and director the winners of an annual contest organized by their production company (Live Planet), and the result was this appreciable "Feast," a fun class B-movie that combines splatter with an intelligent use of humor and frenetic action. We talked about the three main components on which "Feast" was built. Obviously, horror is the star, if not only because this film is 100% horror without genre uncertainties. Specifically, "Feast" can be comfortably cataloged as splatter. Red liquids (blood), green (vomiting), white (sperm) happily splatter during the 80 minutes of duration in a series of situations ranging from paradoxical to disgusting, between eyes gouged out, heads smashed, and penises severed, without ever forgetting a calibrated sense of grotesque irony and showcasing excellent homemade special effects. The irony is the direct consequence of the abundant display of splatter because it is known that the horrifying situations in which hemoglobin flows in rivers are a reason for laughter and boisterous fun rather than fear and tension. "Feast" uses extreme and cartoonish splatter to its advantage, always avoiding falling into parody and farce; moreover, the film is permeated with brilliant dialogues put in the mouths of perfectly sketched characters, despite the evident overabundance, each of whom is presented by funny freeze-frames that explain in a comic way to the spectator their characteristics and life expectations, thus playing openly also with genre stereotypes. The characters are many, a good part of them leave the scene in the first fifteen minutes of the film (including the fetish actor of Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, who plays himself), none of them has a name but an explicit nickname that identifies them (e.g., "hero," "the beer guy," "the motivator," "barista," etc.), and above all, all the rules that usually regulate the survival hierarchies of the characters of a horror movie are shattered... see for yourself. The action is managed in such a way that there is not a single dead minute within the film, so the high pace contributes to making "Feast" a perfect entertainment. The only flaw of a rather inspired and also inventive direction lies precisely in the staging of some action scenes, especially those involving the monsters, always too chaotic to make it difficult to understand precisely what is happening on the screen. The reason is certainly not due to moments of lack of lucidity of the director and editor, but clearly from an expedient to mask the poverty (and maybe the lack of credibility) in the creation of the monsters. Confusion certainly, but the trick works, since the perception and memory that the spectator will have of the creatures is entirely positive. Behind the camera, we find the debutant John Gulager, son of an artist (his father, Clu Gulager, is a sort of legend of the small screen, as well as appearing in "Feast" in the role of the barista) and winner of the Project Greenlight contest that gave him the opportunity to debut as a director. The script is the work of the duo Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, also "born" from Project Greenlight and then arrived as screenwriters of the "Saw" saga, of which they took care of the chapters from 4 to 7. Cast rich in character actors and talented unknowns ranging from the already mentioned Clu Gulager to the other old TV star Eileen Ryan, through the punk singer and part-time actor Henry Rollins ("Wrong Turn 2;" "Devil's Tomb") and Duane Whitaker ("Pulp Fiction;" "From Dusk Till Dawn 2"). Special mention for the trio of "armed dolls," consisting of the heroine Navi Rawat ("Undead or Alive"), the Honey Pie Jenny Wade ("Family Ties"), and the waitress Tuffy Krista Allen ("Shock Therapy"). "Feast" is a hilarious and impeccable splatter film that cannot be missing from the personal videotape of every horror enthusiast. Cult.