Feast (review)

The latest entry from the filmmaking-as-reality-TV Project Greenlight is the first one that really feels like a, you know, movie, and not like an exercise in film-school masturbation. Oh, it’s self-aware, all right, but it’s sending up cinematic self-awareness as much as it’s pushing boundaries of decency and taste... just like a horror movie should. This is 88 minutes of pure snark-fueled adrenaline rush, a nonstop disgusting grossout of meaty, liquid carnality that is both hilarious and uncomfortable, reveling in satirizing now-hidebound conventions of the genre while at the same time grounding itself in archetypal intensity. Tanktop-wearing babes fired by maternal instinct piss off, protect, and enthrall the ineffectual, even cowardly guys as a gang of locals -- to call them ragtag would be generous -- hole up in a desert bar, besieged by mysterious, ravenous beasties. The cast is, at best, known only to fans of the cultish and obscure, but the real star is director John Gulager’s breakneck visual style, which delights in breaking speed limits and taking dangerous curves in the full knowledge that you’ve got no seatbelt.

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