Feed

This is definitely one of those movies that ends and leaves you wondering "what the fuck did I just watch?". I decided to check this out after seeing it show up time and again on peoples' lists of the movies they found most disturbing. After having viewed it, I see why it's considered so but can't say that it was especially hard to stomach. Heh.

There's a preamble that says something along the lines of "while this story is fictional, things like this are happening right now all over the world", which is far from an uplifting thought. The story concerns a young man in Toledo, Ohio who feeds women to death for fun and profit on the interwebs. His exclusive website offers wagering on the vital signs and lifespan of his projects. Meanwhile, there's a cop in Sydney, Australia who decides this guy needs to be stopped. The cop has been scarred by his experience in Germany of busting a guy who was cutting another guy up piece by piece and feeding his own body to him (sorry if that's not clear, but think of the worst possible way to read that and you're on the right track). Therefore he's pretty bent on finding and stopping the feeder dude.

Feed isn't the most tightly paced movie I've seen lately. It can't seem to decide whether it's a horror movie, a psychological thriller, or a black comedy. It dabbles in all three but never congeals into any one of them. It wasn't awful or anything, but it could have been a lot better. For example, the music is pretty much ghastly - lots of ironic oldies and crappy covers of crappy 80's tunes. The bad guy is one of those scary smart judo master geniuses. Unfortunately for his scare factor he has a giant tramp stamp. Not particularly scary. At least not in the way the filmmakers envisioned. Also, there's a love interest who spends the first third of the movie or so fucking the Australian cop a bunch of different ways. It's total Skinemax fodder for quite a while until things get gory towards the end.

If you're skeeved by giant fat people, this movie will disgust you and creep you out. People are force fed slurry containing the melted fat of dead people. There are lots of shots of rotting food and corpses. Even the more sexy type stuff shown early in the film is gross. I guess you could call it disturbing. I don't think all of the ham handed (sorry) subtext really comes through, but you can't blame them for trying. You certainly won't see a film like this come along every day.

Tomorrow: Threads