Feast (2005)

Feast arrived in 2005 as the prize of a television contest, a monster movie assembled by committee and handed to a first-time director who had plainly watched a great deal of creature cinema and drawn the least respectable conclusions from it. A Nevada bar, a family of ravenous things outside, a cast of patrons named for their function: Hero, Beer Guy, Harley Mom, Bossman. The film has no interest beyond the next kill, and it pursues that interest with something close to devotion. It is crude, loud, and entirely content to be so.

For the purposes of cultural accounting, the ledger is thin. The cast is more varied than the genre generally managed in that era, though the film never remarks on it, and every character is defined by the manner of their death. Race, sexuality, class, ecology, the interior life of the mind: none of it appears on the menu. What passes for a feminist gesture is the late promotion of Tuffy to the onscreen title of Heroine 2, a woman who takes command once grief has hollowed her out. This sits beside the film's enthusiasm for undressing its actresses and its willingness to play a sexual assault on a still-living body for laughs. The gesture is not a statement. It is a beat in a horror movie, and the movie knows it.

There is no sermon here. Feast never pauses to instruct, never turns to the audience to explain what should be felt. It wants to disgust and amuse in roughly equal measure, and it manages often enough to account for a mixed critical reception and a pair of sequels. We can classify it, note the near-total absence of contemporary social consciousness, and file it accordingly. The patrons of that bar do not deserve a message. They deserve to be eaten, and the film obliges them without hesitation.