Feast – Unrated
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C- Feature: C
Matt
Damon and Ben Affleck have been puzzled as to why their series Project Greenlight has not produced any
hits. Is it the curse of reality
TV? Is it limited experience in that they
have not done much non-acting film work since writing Good Will Hunting? Well, the
third season of the show focused on the Horror genre and even had Wes Craven
assisting. Yes, Craven has good
credentials, but John Gulager’s Feast
(2006) looks and plays like every other phony-creatures-on-the-kill film we
have seen recently (like Slither,
for instance) made sillier by an awkward adding of Quentin Tarantino and Robert
Rodriguez elements.
Of course
like Affleck and Damon, they too are part of the Weinstein creative family, but
instead of letting Gulager breathe and find his own voice, he is subsumed by
the same old same old indie chic that is now tired formula in itself that seems
more prepackaged than ever. To its
advantage, they did cast Henry Rollins and the neglected Balthazar Getty, but
they are limited to a one-liner mentality that does not know if this film is
funny, scary or just so tragically hip that it is unintentionally funny to
those in the know for all the worse reasons the producers have somehow not
considered.
Running
about 90 minutes, it just runs on and on and on. Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan wrote this,
but are too busy thinking they know all about genre because they are fans
and/or just came out of film school to know what they are doing. Gulager is also accomplice to its many
failures. These projects should be about
innovation, not convention. Well, there
is another season of Project Greenlight
if they have not thrown in the towel yet.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is on the soft side, likely shot in
digital high definition and has really bad and overused digital title cards
that are flat and ruin the film’s momentum.
Color is downplayed and this looks like a bad rehash of everything we
have already seen in the genre. The
Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is also fair, recorded in what either sounds like bad
sound recordist work or at a lower level here than it should be. Extras include outtakes, deleted scenes,
splatter effects featurette, making of featurette and commentary by all the
behind the camera principles. A
disappointment all around. You can read
about the HD-DVD at the following link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/5241/Feast+-+Unrated+(HD-DVD)
- Nicholas Sheffo
