FEAST (2005) FIVE TOP HATS

Let me start by saying that the first Feast movie is awesome. It has great production value, good actors, fantastic gore and creature effects, kick-ass camera work, it’s hilarious, it came out of the blue and had more WTF moments that I had seen in forever. When this first came out my friends and I watched it three weekends in a row. This was produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Wes Craven and stars folks like Krista Allen, Balthazar Getty and Henry Rollins – as well as the always hilarious Clu Gulager (the director’s dad) and Eric Dane in one of the coolest, smallest roles in recent memory (he’s the guy that’s gonna save your ass if you missed him). This movie was soooooo good, and the fans loved it, so we knew there would be more. Sadly, the sequels are awful so I bet this franchise is done at three. Anyway, Feast is a great horror movie – I loved it. Another thing – this was the first (and only?) time I had ever seen character introductions with “life expectancies” on them – hilarious! I could probably go on and on and on about all of the stuff I liked in Feast, if my fingers could take it.

To start we are introduced to a dozen or so characters (all with differing life expectancies and occupations) with the most important probably being Bartender (Clu Gulager), Honey Pie (Jenny Wade), Bozo (Getty) and Tuffy (Krista Allen) but, no one is safe in this thing, no one.  After the intros and some line delivery, Dane busts in, covered in blood, holding a gun in one hand and something bloody in the other. I have to stop here to write up one of my favorite monologues ever, but it really has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

He busts in, as above, and says, while looking around, throwing the creature’s head to the ground and making sure Bartender’s shotgun is loaded:

Hero: Unless you people wanna die, you’ll do what I say and you’ll do it fast. Listen to me. A storm o’hell’s coming down on this place any second. I don’t know what they are, I don’t know where they came from. All I do know is that these fuckers are fast, nasty, and hungry… and there’s four of ‘em. They got claws like Ginsu knives and more teeth than a chainsaw. They’re comin’… right now. So we gotta lock this bar down. That means doors, windows, drains, and zippers, and we gotta do it now. You! Get a phone, call the cops, National Guard, townies, anybody who kicks ass, and get ‘em out here. Any questions?
Bartender: Yeah. Who the hell are you?
Hero: I’m the guy that’s gonna save your ass.

Then a monster immediately crashes through the window and rips his head off and more blood is blurted all over the bar and it’s patrons than the human body holds. I really just had to watch that twice I liked it so much.

Back to the fun: within seconds a baby monster is in the bar and a leg has been sliced off, Jason Mewes face is ripped off, blood is everywhere and Clu screams “Someone close the mother fucking shutters!!!!!!” They cage the baby in the beer freezer and we get a moment’s respite before everyone rushes upstairs for Tuffy’s kid. He only lasts a couple of emotional seconds before he too is ripped to shreds and the creature is spewing gallons and gallons of green, maggot filled vomit all over Judah Friedlander. We get another few minutes off while they board up the joint before the baby in the freezer starts acting up and they pump it full of bullets and we get this exchange:

Honey Pie: [Re: first monster trapped and killed] Jeez, it took all that? All those bullets?
Beer Guy: That’s the LITTLE one? We can’t fight these things! No way!
Heroine: We can still fight them. We just gotta be clever.
Coach: Maybe we don’t have to fight them at all.
Bozo: Yeah, why don’t we just call ‘em names.

Well, Henry Rollins’ character decides to dangle the dead baby monster out the window to show the others their human superiority and that doesn’t turn out good for anybody. First they take their dead baby and eat it, then procreate and make another one. Inside the bar, our group tries to make a survival plan, while Friedlander starts to mutate. As they count their ammunition, something busts in upstairs – where they need to go to get the short wave radio. Things kind of slow down for a little bit while they unsuccessfully try and get the radio and they hatch a plan to distract them by throwing one of the dead bodies on the other side of the bar as a distraction, then rolling kegs of beer out the front door “like Donkey Kong” to make it to their vehicles.  Obviously, things don’t go as planned: the body is not dead but it goes out the window anyway (and something very disgusting happens), they don’t make it to the truck and our number of surviving characters starts to diminish quickly. Well, this is running long so I think it’s safe to say that nothing good happens to anyone here and we get a very,very, violent, bloody, last thirty minutes after the monsters get inside the bar. There is something extremely funny regarding Honey Pie not to be missed when she makes it to that beer truck.

In the end – I loved watching this movie the first time I saw it, as well as each subsequent viewing and even more so today after a few years. I don’t know how they got this so right, but the next two movies are awfully wrong.

FEAST 2: SLOPPY SECONDS (2008) TWO TOP HATS

Usually when my friends and I get together, after a few hours of beer and conversation, the night can quickly end up being nothing but poop stories and fart and sex jokes. That has to be what happened with the guys who made Feast 2 and 3 because, as the title implies, they went down the sex, poop, fart rabbit hole and delivered us two stinking sequels. In the review of Feast, I mentioned there were several WTF-I-didn’t-see-that-coming moments that made the movie so wickedly entertaining. In these two (they were shot at the same time) they must have been sitting around the table and just randomly writing ideas about things they’ve never seen in a movie on the whiteboard and stuck them in whenever they felt like it.  While I have watched thousands of movies, I have never produced one, so maybe having Affleck and Damon and Craven reigning these guys in was what made the first one so good. The director of this, John Gulager, is making the sequel to the terrific Piranha 3D… I hope he doesn’t stink it up like he did with these.

At the end of Feast, there were four survivors: Bozo (Getty), Honey Pie (Wade), Tuffy (Allen) and Bozo’s unmentioned brother Hot Wheels. If you have seen the first one, you know that Honey Pie had made it to the beer truck and left them all at the mercy of the creatures. Bozo, Tuffy and HW made it out alive and drove off into the sunset. Well none of those three actors return, which is a shame because they were the best three out of the  group. In these we get a new set of actors and three returnees – Bartender has survived his heart attack and neck stabbing, and the actress who played Harley Mom returns as her twin sister Biker Queen, and Honey Pie is eventually tracked down. So, let’s see what we’ve got.

Biker Queen rides up to the bar and shoots a dog for some unknown reason. As it happens, the dog has a severed hand in it’s mouth, which happens to be the severed hand of her sister who was blown to smithereens earlier (they both have / had tattoos on their hands that formed the word “sister” you see). She finds Bartender hiding under a trailer and asks him what happened to her sister. At first he denies knowing anything but she tortures him on her Harley tailpipe and he fesses up about Bozo – so she knocks him out, ties him to her hog and they head into town to extract revenge. We are then subjected to “16 hours earlier” and introduced to two Mexican tag-team wrestlers, one of which is doing it with his girlfriend – while wearing his Lucha Libre wrestling match. Very swiftly, the monsters are ripping through town, tear the girl in half and they run out of their trailer, one still nude with his gigantic, prosthetic, bloody dong flipping around. We are also introduced to a car salesman talking filthy on a telephone – in front of a couple holding a baby.  To round off our new cast, we get the car salesman’s wife porking a different sales guy named Greg  (the director’s brother) and, eventually, Biker Queen’s gang of tough bitches, The Bleeders, who mainly exist to go topless for the entire third movie.

One of the things that was so fun(ny) about the first was the amount of “blood” they splurted all over the place, gallons and gallons and gallons of it; here, to my dismay, 99% of the red stuff is not very effective CGI. Anyway, The Bleeders roll into town looking for Bozo and wade through the carnage and the severed heads and the burning cars and the dead bodies and the turned over fire hydrants and meet up with various survivors and shoot a bunch of people and find Honey Pie and Bartender beats the shit out of her and throws her out of a two story window and she’s fine and she runs off and they meet up with the dwarfs in their “soundproof fort” that has no window panes and they have killed a monster by shoving a machete up it’s ass and then it’s night and the monsters are running around screwing every single thing that can take their two foot cocks and someone is using a cell phone that has a dial tone and Honey Pie is out on the streets and they are using a telescope to make a key to the lock of the prison doors and Honey Pie has climbed on the roof and fallen through but is now in some sort of retail store and Greg is going to dissect the creature so they crack it open it’s full of maggots and he pokes something and yes it farts and this is disgusting and it sprays thousands of gallons green vomit all over the grandmother and even though she’s safe Honey Pie is trying really hard to break the front glass door of the shop she’s in which makes no fucking sense and then Greg pushes something else inside the carcass and yes it shits all over the car salesman’s wife and then he touches it’s balls “in the name of science” and it squirts unbelievable amounts of it’s load ALL OVER EVERYONE and what the fuck it’s got a giant eye and mouth inside it’s own body and it’s screaming???

Enough of that – eventually everyone ends up on the roof of the warehouse surrounded by the creatures who are forcing their way in. Everything is chaos and things look grim as we prepare for the third act.

Did I mention that at one point Greg has dropped off the roof to save a crying baby? As he is heading back he is chased by a couple  of the creatures and throws the baby back as bait – to wit the baby is eaten? “Wow, that’s bad even for this group.” Bartender murmurs. Sho nuff.

FEAST 3: THE HAPPY FINISH (2009) TWO TOP HATS

At the end of Sloppy Seconds, Honey Pie has escaped the store and is hobbling down the street bloodied and pant-less. Greg has taken a rod through the head from the malfunctioning dwarf throwing machine and the creatures have burst through the doors onto the roof. Down below, one of the dwarf wrestlers has been chewed in half and the other, after sneaking across the street inside a garbage can, had a stick of dynamite thrown in said can and has been blown up. The explosion from that sent a hinge from the police station flying down the street which sliced Honey Pie’s neck open from behind. Oh yeah, and two of the remaining members of The Bleeders (who have no lines) are naked except for their gun holsters. There we go – all hell has broken loose.

We fire this one up rehashing the end of 2 and get offered up the character bios and life expectancies again, which would have been fun, I suppose, if the second movie hadn’t been so awful. To add to the misery, Honey Pie, who we have invested so much of our time in, gets her head lopped off in the first few minutes, it is then eaten and crapped out, for real. Was that really necessary? The monsters on the roof get shot and beaten and destroyed with the motorcycle and our survivors head down, still trying to get into that police station the meth addict is holding down.  As they make their way down the stairs, outside, a dude in a modified army vehicle comes screaming down the street, running over what was left of the one little person. This character’s bio lists him as Shitkicker with a life expectancy of “Better Than God”. Oh for Pete’s sake – the group finally get into the station and literally beat the shit out the meth addict – he shits himself to nice squirty, gurgly noise effects. The group spends a few shitless minutes formulating a plan to get over to that car lot and get the F out of this town once and for all.  After a few charming moments between Shitkicker and the car salesman’s wife, she accidentally blows his brains all over the wall.

Shortly after that, they all make a break (in two groups) for the car lot and run into “Lightning”, the dwarf blown up in the trash can. Well he is fine so they pop him on the wife’s back and head off. The other group hides out in a storage unit with a creature on the outside. Do you know what happens next? The creature sticks it’s weenus through a drain hole and fucks the dickhead car salesman through it – whose belly promptly explodes, creating a hybrid monster with enormous testicles.  Biker Queen frees the two remaining Bleeders and they head underground into the meth-man’s meth lab – a school bus buried under the earth. Sure enough, a creature get in, kills one of The Breeders, but the Biker Queen gets the thing fired up and the drive it up through the earth.  Blah, blah, blah – everyone is eventually reunited, they meet up with Josh Blue from “Last Comic Standing” as The Prophet who can speak to the monsters and they head underground (again) into the cavernous sewer system of this small West Texas town.

After travelling a ways on their hands and knees, farting into people’s faces, they come to an intersection where they are set upon by a group of knife wielding, murderous who live in the sewers who stab “Tit Girl” to death and threaten the rest. Luckily, in the sewers mind you, they are saved by a karate kicking youth. Sadly, the youth goes to close the manhole he came through and gets his arm ripped off.  The group separates and we obviously have more bloody runs ins with creatures, an underground sewer rave(??), and then the big, climactic fight with the hybrid human monster thing, where, for lack of weapons, they BITE it to death.

So, here we are, at the end, how else can we finish this trilogy up? How about a giant robot that smashes the last of the survivors (except Bartender) and a Elvis clad Mexican singing Mariachi over the credits? Oh boy….

Thus endeth the Feast trilogy.