Review: Feast (2006)

One thing I love about the horror community is how readily we recommend other horror flicks to each other.  We all have our preferences - like my love for creature features - but ask anyone who considers themselves a horror buff what their favorite movies are or what they'd recommend, and you will get a list and enthusiastic summaries of said movies.  One of the blogs I frequent, Final Girl, has made that very exercise a feature of multiple Shocktober celebrations.

Feast came into my life in such a way.  A now-defunct blog had posted what they considered the 50 greatest horror movie kills, and a scene from Feast 2 happened to catch my attention.  Not long after, I came across collection of the trilogy and made the purchase.  With my brother, I marathoned the trilogy and it became one of my absolute favorites right on the spot.

Set at a remote bar in the late hours of the night, Feast follows the patrons of that bar as the try to survive an attack from extremely tough, extremely gross creatures.  Will they be able to escape, or are they doomed to be killed by the monsters?

Very quickly, the viewer realizes that this is an anything-goes movie: People die left and right - even those you'd expect to last much longer.  And while many movies have aspired to an 'anyone can die' approach, this movie truly lives in that world.  No one has script immunity, which adds to tension of each attempt to kill or escape the creatures.

Despite a limited budget (the filmmakers were the winners of the third season of Project Greenlight), the creatures look great, and the setting is used judiciously.  A lot of horror films have problems with developing the layout of their locations, but Feast very quickly (and very smartly) establishes the levels of the bar and how to get to each.

The movie is also incredibly funny, with each major character getting an intro card summarizing their character and alluding to their potential fate.  Most of them don't even use the character's real names, and quite a few are bitingly mean in giving their rundown with such lines as "Life Expectancy: Losers and dorks go first... ...He's both."

For fans of no-holds barred horror, this is a great movie for you, as long as you can deal with gore.  And this movie is gory - limbs are ripped off, eyes are pulled out, amongst other things - and the movie finds ways to be gross in other ways that are not for the feint of heart.

A great, little-seen movie that is a blast.  Easy recommend for me (the sequels provide diminishing returns, sadly)

8.5 out of 10