Once again horror fans are getting an early start on their Halloween celebrations. While the masses wait for Grudge II, Saw III, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning those with current access to the right theaters have a chance to see what may end up being the most entertaining of the entire Halloween crop and who would have thought such a movie would get made courtesy of HBO’s now defunct Project Greenlight.

Feast is a horror/comedy with a ferocious appetite for viewer expectations taking a tried and true formula for cheesy scares and gratuitous gore and turning it on its head and then biting its head off and then … you get the idea. By the time the movie is through you really aren’t sure what you’ve been witness to, but one thing is certain: any horror film that offers up poet rocker Henry Rollins as a bad motivational speaker in pink sweatpants is worth thinking through.

A seedy bar - I mean a REALLY seedy bar - is suddenly invaded by a shotgun toting couple who announce that the hordes of hell are about to descend. Before you know it the rundown shack is under assault by hyper intelligent flesh hungry monsters. Everybody pretty much has guns but that turns out to be not as good a thing as you might expect. The characters here are stock - the self serving bar owner, the old prostie lush, the mother and child, the out-of-towner and the biker chick, the cripple etc. but what the movie does with them you will never guess and the way it does it catapults Feast squarely into the "I can’t believe they just did that” school.

Another nice aspect to this film is its nonexploitive take on horror sexuality. Instead of using its female cast as clotheshorses who exist merely to shed their clothes Feast questions what all those male fans are so hungry for - constantly reminding us that however cute Honey Pie the waitress and the other female characters are they are first and foremost people who've been plunged into an awful situation. In other words if you have sex on the brain while a flesh eating monster is threatening then perhaps you should just go outside, fantasizing about whether Mary-Anne or Ginger wants you more and save the monster the trouble of breaking in. That way everybody gets what they want including Ginger and Mary-Anne who don't want to service you anyway.

Last year a big film for me was Slither. It was gross in way that understood the old Romero quote, “If you can’t see the humor in dead people eating other people I can’t explain it to you." Actually I think George, with all due respect, is wrong. The impulse of the average horror fan is mostly, I think, the adult equivalent of wanting a peek under your friend's scab at the playground. It offers the chance to gape at the wonder of our dissected biology and pricks the notion of what it even means to be a person by lending a note of mystery and wonder to our fear of death and hope of transcending rot. And at its heart it’s almost entirely experiential, demanding almost no thought, apprehended almost completely on instinct.

The monsters here are hard to describe but pretty original. Whoever made the design decisions was wise indeed. Given the small budget as Feast pulls off multiple creature designs very effectively. The larger creatures resemble Star Wars’ Banthas while the smaller versions reminded me of Xtro.

But the real stars here are the direction and the performances. Gulager makes the most of his locations and while he uses quick cutting to hide the film's low budget he does it well, pausing once in a while to give his audience a rest and conveying a sense of the action that, while not as clear as I tend to like, does manage to provide the film a high level of intensity. As for the performances the cast gets the chance over and over again to prove how exceptionally goofy and grand humans can be when put under enough stress. Sometimes characters manage to be both at once and as characters are picked off here odds are you’ll miss them and not just think of them as another body in the count.

Feast is not a great film - not as over the top as Slither and not as scary as Alien. And it isn’t written quite cleverly enough to be more than a nod to the trapped and picked off sub genre. But it is a lot of fun and at least attempts to make the American horror film truly horrific instead of merely entertaining.