Expectations Reversed

Take two premises: one, a group of losers stuck in a bar in the middle of nowhere while marauding monsters try to eat them; and two, a hitman wakes up to discover that his rivals have poisoned him in such a way that he can only stay alive by keeping his adrenaline flowing at near full-tilt. Hamstring the first by making it part of a very public and televised contest, subjecting it to the sort of production limitations Lars Von Trier would snicker about, and assign it to an unknown first-time director; lavish the second with a semi-famous action star, multiple extended locations around Los Angeles, and throw in a helicopter shot and plenty of CG. In the end, what would you expect? That the first would be a schlocky, unpalatable mess of cliches, while the second would be a thrill ride from start to finish? Strangely enough, that's what I expected, too. Reality, as the title of the post suggests, was different.

Feast is a smart, funny, rip-roaring gore-fest aimed at the gore-fest segment of the population. It not only defies the expectations based on its lack of funding and its inexperienced director, it also defies all expectations of standard, cliched monster flicks. This is a labor of love by two writers and a director who get monster movies, who have sat through monster movies in the theater and have, like us, yelled at the screen when the characters have acted like idiots or the monsters have fallen into the rut so successfully exploited by the Scream franchise. There are no answers in this movie, only monsters and the people who end up having to fight them. (There's also sex(-ish), violence, cussing (no, not profanity, I mean cussing, the sort of asinine things that people in roadhouses say), and tons and tons and tons of gore. And more gore. Oh, did I mention the gore?) If you like your gore-fest horror with intelligence and wit, this is the movie for you.

Crank only sort-of delivers on its promises. It starts off well, with Jason Stratham going full-bore to try to figure out what's happening to him, but then it's as if either a studio exec got his hands on it and demanded more, I dunno, notes, or the writer-directors just ran out of things to do. In the hands of Antoine Fuqua, a movie about a man who has to run at top-speed around LA would work; the pacing would be right, the interactions would make sense, even the sex would have been less sensationalist and more relevant. Neveldine and Taylor just don't have the experience to pull it off, and this is a shame, because they do put some very nice moments in (the scene where Stratham is trying to get coke and information from a club owner, for example, was wittily written and executed... to a point, and then devolves into stupidity). Crank loses its focus around the 50-minute mark, and it's all downhill from there.