reMedia!

An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Friday, December 01, 2006

film | Rocky horror picture shows

Ah, the midnight movie: a genre that, to be truly successful, must navigate the fine line between being legitimately amusing and self-consciously — or, if you prefer, inadvertently — godawful. FEAST and SLITHER, a pair of goop-drenched additions to the intentional-B-flick canon, aren't shooting for much more than a cult following in a few years' time, and while they do a convincing job of walking the walk and talking the talk, they don't quite, uh, breathe the breath. In other words, they're not quite amusing or terrible enough to be midnight movies. They'd probably play at 9:45 p.m.

Feast is the more curious title simply because it's the final product of the third season of the HBO filmmaking reality show Project Greenlight, and it's decidedly not a coming-of-age drama à la rounds one (Stolen Summer) and two (The Ballad of Shaker Heights). No, Feast is lean, mean and entirely nostalgia-free, unless it's nostalgia on your part for a meatier monster mash. True, there's nothing wrong with a wispy story — bar patrons fend off hungry mutant creatures in the desolate Texas desert — that sets up a fast and furious ride, and Feast initially looks to be headed in that direction. Its first 20 minutes are rollicking fun, playfully winking at horror conventions by introducing each cast member via on-screen statistics that tout his or her stock-character archetype (the woebegone single mom [Krista Allen], the antagonistic prick [Balthazar Getty], the grizzled veteran [Clu Gulager], the vulnerable teen [Josh Zuckerman]) and assorted trivial information. The moment Feast's obligatory fearless hero (Eric Dane) — "Job: kicking ass; Life Expectancy: pretty fucking good" — bursts onto the scene and begins to take charge, the movie hilariously knees viewer expectation in the groin, and all bets are off.

Or so you'll think. After this and another great jolt are out of the way, Feast settles into an increasingly humdrum riff on From Dusk Till Dawn, with ravenous beasties from Stan Winston's yard sale standing in for Dusk's mob of rowdy Mexican vampires. With its clever novelty gags mostly expired, Feast becomes an overextended episode of Tales from the Crypt, and episodes of Tales from the Crypt run a scanty half-hour for a reason. Director John Gulager (Clu's son) frequently amplifies the sensory commotion and packs in the jokey details — Jason Mewes, the Jay half of Kevin Smith's Jay & Silent Bob, apparently playing himself — in an attempt to mask either his movie's throwaway-junk silliness ("The monsters are doin' it doggy-style!") or an effects budget best described as deficient, but that only means you can easily sit through most of Feast without being particularly engaged by it.

Where Feast doesn't particularly give a shit — most of its characters don't even have names, let alone backstories — Slither sorta-kinda wants you to care if its cast winds up falling victim to some slobbering behemoth, which makes it closer in spirit to the 1950s drive-in attractions they used to razz on Mystery Science Theater 3000. If Slither was one of them, it'd be called Earth Vs. Tentacles or Hubby from Beyond the Known Galaxy, though I guess Slither does succinctly describe most of the action in the movie: An alien parasite lands in the kind of sleepy little burg Norman Rockwell used to paint and infects the local Mr. Moneybags (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer's Michael Rooker), who morphs into a grotesquely slimy entity worthy of his own Fangoria cover, then fathers a squirming mass of slugs that burrow into the townspeople and turn them into sentient zombies. His beautiful trophy wife (Elizabeth Banks of The 40-Year-Old Virgin) is understandably distraught.

The problem is, Slither's a horror-comedy that ain't especially frightening or funny. The performers sure are game — particularly Banks and Nathan Fillion, the droll captain of TV's wonderful Firefly, as a swaggering cop — but the movie funnels their pitch-perfect pluck into endless scenes that build nicely, then jump to the next distraction in lieu of delivering any kind of payoff, a frustration that occasionally bungled director James Gunn's Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004. Consider Slither's finale, which feels cobbled together — perhaps intentionally? — from the climaxes of countless other sub-inspired sci-fi thrillers, then lazily doesn't go out of its way to mock its own familiarity or do something quirky or different. A joke in search of a decent punchline, Slither, like Feast, is ultimately not bad enough to be good, not good enough to be memorable, and never stable enough on the bad-good tightrope to be midnight-movie bliss. Feast: C+ Slither: C

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