On its third and final attempt, Project Greenlight came up with a real movie--but if you want to see it on the big screen, you'd better hurry, as Dimension Films is giving John Gulager's Feast a midnights-only run tonight and tomorrow before slapping it onto DVD on Oct. 17. The prior films spawned by the HBO/Bravo TV show, Stolen Summer and The Battle of Shaker Heights, served only to prove that good movies could not be willed into existence by reality television; I had to look up their titles on the web, so lackluster and unmemorable were they. I'm not sure Feast, a down-and-dirty contrast to the highmindedness and pretension of the other two, is all that good a movie, either, and the cramped, closed-in, claustrophobic images and strobe-fast editing will probably play more comfortably on the small screen than the large.
But Feast feels like a real movie, and the audience I saw it with ate up its zilch-budget exuberance. Their response was a rebuke to co-producer Matt Damon, who was reportedly unhappy that a dumpster-dive into horror movies was going to be Greenlit, and I must say it was an easier sit for me than most of the films released thus far by The Weinstein Company, which should have gone through a TV vetting process. Feast has a simple sharks-circling-swimmers premise, in the tradition of The Birds, Night of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead or From Dusk Till Dawn: The last-call patrons of the Beer Trap Tavern, a Tex-Mex dive bar, find themselves besieged by "monkey motherfuckers," unexplained cannibalistic humanoids who wear the skins of their victims. In a novel meta-movie touch, the one-dimensional characters, played with sufficient conviction by actors whose ever-dwindling number includes Balthazar Getty, Jason Mewes, Henry Rollins, and veteran Clu Gulager, the director's father, are introduced via freeze frames, with text boxes that give their designation-type names (Bartender, Harley Mom, Vet) and life expectancy. Note: Don't believe everything you read.
[The audience favorite was Eileen Ryan, who, as Grandma, does what Walter Matthau does in Earthquake and responds to the crisis by getting more drunk. Ryan is also in her son, Sean Penn's, new film All the King's Men, but I bet this one was a lot more fun to make.]
Feast was written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, who, as the draft press notes tell us, "served in the same fraternity at the University of Iowa and both found themselves in Los Angeles in 1999 with an idea about monsters attacking a tavern." Well, we've all been there, but credit to them for actually following through with it, and Gulager for directing it with the press-kit's "velocity and ferocity." Maybe too much of both; the 88-minute movie streaks by in a blur of salty dialogue and a flesh-ripping action, mowing down the cliches of the genre without taking a stand and carving a truly distinctive mark of its own.
Feast is raucously scary/funny, however, in its beer-bust fashion, and I wish I tuned into the show to see how Gary J. Tunnicliffe and Kevin O'Neill created its convincing, no-budget makeup and visual effects. If nothing else, Feast passes the smell test--it's a bonafide film, one that turns the limitations of Project Greenlight into a plus in its proudly ramshackle way, and not a wan extra to accompany the release of the show's last season on DVD.
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