Feast

At the opening to the third (and final) season of Project Greenlight, the Dimension Films representatives threw in the creative towel. After the commercial wipeout of the series' first two films (Stolen Summer and The Battle of Shaker Heights), they decided to aim for the lowest common denominator and greenlight a horror-comedy script that everyone from Wes Craven to Matt Damon recognized was neither scary nor funny. Their reasoning was that the horror genre was hot and that even critical trash could become box office treasure. What they failed to realize is that horror comedies almost never do well commercially and that a horror film approved for the masses by studio heads, but hated by the Master of Horror, isn't likely to connect with anyone.

Like Peter Berg's The Rundown, Feast opens in a bar with freeze frame graphics giving us the vital stats on its patrons. The bar, The Beer Trap, is a desert watering hole populated by the likes of Henry Rollins' surprisingly keyed down motivational speaker, Balthazar Getty's misogynist prick, Krista Allen's trick-turning single mom, and Jason Mewes's... Jason Mewes. Eric Dane's Hero and Navi Rawat's Heroine soon appear and tell them that they accidentally crashed into a Skekses-like creature and that its parents have descended upon the bar for revenge. What follows is copious amounts of gore, surprisingly sparse humor, and blurry, zoomed-in, sped-up action scenes that are utterly impossible to follow.

It's clear that neophyte scribes Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton tried to fuse Assault on Precinct 13 with the second half of From Dusk Till Dawn to create a horror/comedy/action hybrid, but their script is plagued by a litany of stodgy characters who died on the page long before they die on the screen. Worse, Mewes, the only actor capable of spinning comic gold out of the writers' trite quips, is killed off in the first few minutes and center stage is ceded to Rawat (The O.C.), another studio concession, who kills every scene with her leaden delivery. The pacing of the film is also bizarrely off-kilter with a flurry of action at the very beginning, followed by horror and action beats that only randomly crop up in fits and starts.

Gulager was touted as a sort of directorial idiot savant on Project Greenlight 3, but there's little in the finished product to suggest a personal stamp on the material, which, to his credit, seems to have died a death by a thousand cuts. What's left is a film that dances about its limited budget with two left feet and drowns in a horrible heavy metal soundtrack.

The disc features an 88-minute, unrated version of the film with a murky 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Gulager, the writers, 2 producers, and creature designer Gary J. Tunnicliffe (Candyman) contribute a commentary track which, like the film, is plagued by too many people with too little to say. We also get about 7 minutes of worthless deleted scenes, 3 minutes of humorless outtakes, a promo for the awful soundtrack, and some decent featurettes on the making of the movie (11 minutes) and its creature effects (about 9 minutes). My advice: pass on Feast and wait for the release of PGL3 on DVD. -- Colin Miller