Close the mother fucking shutters! We’re talking Feast! Imagine the shock on my face when the credits rolled on Feast and I saw producer credits for Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Wes Craven. After some research, I was reminded of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s show Project Greenlight. Feast director John Gulager used this film as his Season 3 Project Greenlight film. Writing the film was [soon to be] Saw IV, V, VI, and VII writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunston. Like most Saw films, Feast falls into a nostalgia-lensed pitfall many mid-aughts films do.
A Desert Bar Under Siege
Feast is about a group of bar patrons who find themselves trapped in a bar deep in the desolate Nevada desert. A man named Hero (Eric Dane) bursts through the door, and a group of creatures are hot on his trail. After quickly dying, his wife, Heroine (Navi Rawat), comes in to take control of the situation. In the bar is a ragtag group of people, from different walks of life, most notably Coach (Henry Rollins), Bartender (Clu Gulager), Grandma (Eileen Ryan), and Beer Guy (Judah Friedlander). (Jason Mewes also has a decently fun cameo as himself.) Once Heroine arrives, all hell breaks loose.
The aughts were fraught with overly ‘witty’ scripts with insanely Tarantino-coded quips. Too many genre filmmakers were trying to craft an image in the vein of a filmmaker who crafted his image from other filmmakers. It started to feel like a snake eating its tail. The story for Feast is a solid chamber piece that relies too heavily on character interactions and relationships more than the impending doom breaking down their doors. And, of course, there are quite a few pieces of dialogue that would be considered iffy in today’s world. Thankfully, we’ve somewhat course-corrected as a society, but Feast’s dated dialogue doesn’t necessarily make the film unwatchable; just cringe.
Style-wise, this film still lives happily in the mid-aughts. Feast has the music video editing that was perfected by the Saw films. Fortunately for editor Kirk M. Morri’s career, he would quickly rid himself of this style and go on to edit modern horror classics like Insidious, The Conjuring, and Malignant. Harsh stylization aside, it also falls prey to the post-9/11 nihilism that so many did during this time. That’s all well and good, but Gulager doesn’t find a positive way to work through this anger.
The Incredibly Unique Creatures of Feast
Who cares about all that? Get to the creatures, dammit! The beasts can move on two legs, hunt in packs, and have an insatiable thirst for blood and revenge. Their revenge kicks off when Hero and Heroine run over one of the baby beasts on the road. One of the most interesting (?) things about the beasts is their sex drive. Rarely, if ever, do we see creatures have sex and, honestly, it’s one of the coolest moments in the film. Yeah, it’s played for laughs, but it feels like an original piece of character lore. We’ve seen creatures multiply their numbers in many films, just not like this!
Another intriguing element of the beasts is their background. Surely, if they’ve been around for hundreds of years, like Burrowers in The Burrowers, someone would have come across them at some point before this. Have they just been excellent stealth machines? Did they escape from some government facility? It wouldn’t be far off to correlate nuclear testing in the Nevada desert to some shady government experimentation. We saw it in The Hills Have Eyes, so it’s plausible. There are two more films in this franchise and I eagerly await watching them, hoping we get some background information on these bipedal beasts.
Is Feast Worth Watching?
The Feast is a visual flashback to a specific time in the world, whether you’re up for that trip is subjective. The creature design and practical effects make Feast a raucous tale of roadkill revenge, soaked in blood, beer, and bile. Its dated script and visuals take you on a trip to a time fueled with anger and fear, though it’s a journey many won’t want to take. My final thought on Feast? It’s truly righteous, man.
