Dark Ride, which was one of the original After Dark HorrorFest films, also suffers from a noticeably undernourished budget. The set, an abandoned amusement park ride in Asbury Park, New Jersey, is cheesy, and the special effects are few and unconvincing; a head that gets split in two is transparently papier-mache.
Poor head-substitution similarly mars an otherwise promising ceiling-fan decapitation in Dead and Deader. And in the same movie when a zombie gets his hand stuck in a meat grinder, it's laughably clear that he's simply wearing a coat with an extra-long sleeve. A single hangar in that film has to pass for an entire army base, which is better, I guess, than the college campus in the exceedingly lame Killer Bash, about a murderous fraternity of guys who are always shirtless, where the dormitories, administration offices and gym are all housed in a single building.
The skimpiness of the sets in so many of these films, and the paltry number of extras, makes you appreciate the genius of the original Saw, which made a virtue of minimalism by filming most of the story in a single rust-stained bathroom.
John Gulager's Feast, by far the best of the DVDs I saw, similarly observes the Aristotelian unities, and takes place in real time, more or less, from dusk to dawn, entirely inside a bar besieged by a family of man-eating aliens.
Fans of Project Greenlight, the Ben Affleck and Matt Damon reality show that dangled a bankroll to emerging indie talent, may recall that Gulager and his project were the third-season winners. The movie was subsequently picked up by the Weinstein brothers, who gave it a few midnight screenings before dumping it to disc.
On the evidence of Feast, however, Gulager is unlikely to languish on home video. His movie is smart, scary, energetic and introduces a brand new weapon into the alien arsenal: copious amounts of green projectile vomit.
Feast is also funny, a trait it has in common, sort of, with Dead and Deader (originally made for TV) and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, which operates on the promising premise that an untrained observer would have a hard time distinguishing between zombies and college kids stoned on drugs.
Both those movies try earnestly for laughs, even if they don't always succeed. Feast scores more often than not because Gulager seems instinctively to understand a principle Aristotle didn't identify but should have: that far from being incompatible with fear, humor can enhance and enrich it, and that at the low end of the budget especially, the best horror movies are the ones that don't take themselves too seriously.
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