You want to root for Feast right from the title sequence. That’s when a small frame of Super 8 footage floats in the center of the black screen; the action it depicts is deadpan and direct and, most effectively of all, quiet. Without question, these are the most evocative and understated moments in the entire movie. Wearing its low-budget status like a badge of honor, the movie then proceeds to come at you at full volume for the next eighty minutes of its runtime. If they can’t compete with the latest J-horror adaptations, franchise installments, and the other rich kids on the block, the filmmakers seem to take pride in embracing the other extreme: we’ve got no arty pedigree or blockbuster original to live up to, so we’re gonna use that freedom to deliver the real goods. If our budget is a third or half that of major horror releases, then at least it we’ll make our film feel like two or three grind house flicks crammed into one.

In short, it’s a movie about a siege and—guess what?—you’re the one that’s under assault.

Of course in the horror genre that’s not necessarily a bad thing. More promising still, it’s a film scripted by horror fans apparently for folks just like them. Endlessly poking fun at the conventions we’re all familiar with, the story plays out like dueling letters in a fan magazine. Unsure whether it should worship at the altar of Romero, Carpenter, or Raimi, the movie practically trips over itself running from one to the other. Moreover, it’s the film’s own savvy that makes things tricky. Please—give me a movie that’s fun for horror fans like me, unapologetic and with ingenuity to spare, but not one that devolves into being a movie about other horror movies. Feast, released briefly in late September, 2006 in select markets and available on DVD less than a month later, walks this line as carefully—and as sloppily—as a drunk who’s been pulled over by troopers. Swaying first one way, then the other, it reaches what generously might be described as a happy medium.

If you want to know whether you should continue to watch Feast after those opening credits or if, like me, you’re unsure how to resolve your ambivalent feelings having seen it in its entirety, there’s always the analogy to one of those bright and cheap buffet restaurants that are ubiquitous at strip malls. In both cases, the paradox is part of the appeal: paying less, you’re nonetheless promised more. And at first your expectations are met. You’re happy to prowl the aisles between the steam tables, greeting both the unexpected and the tried-and-true with equal delight. But the next time up, clean plate in hand, you’re aware that no matter how appetizing its label sound, the food itself now looks washed-out and gloppy after the first hour or so in its chrome tray. That’s okay in some sense: you know the dish wasn’t specially prepared for you but rather as a kind of abstract homage to an item of authentic cuisine that might be served in a real restaurant somewhere else. Bottom line, you end up eating too much, and feeling both satisfied and vaguely guilty. So the question is, do you go out of your way to recommend this establishment to out-of-towners?

Notwithstanding its tendency to self-deconstruction (a characteristic it shares with Scream, another Dimension release), Feast never stops trying to be a straight-ahead entertainment of the horror-comedy variety. Perhaps it would make sense, then, to evaluate it with the criteria one would use for any breakneck chuckles-and-gore extravaganza of this type. Let’s see. It’s attention-grabbing and momentum-building… check. Diverting even while delivering exposition… check. Keeps exposition to a minimum in the first place… yep, it does that, too. All in all, one has to acknowledge first-time director John Gulager for being so bold and upfront with his intentions as well as technically adept enough to keep the promises made by scriptwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan.

The risk a movie like this runs, of course, is that it better never slow down or lose even for a moment its cheerfully mean-spirited tone. If it does, you start to notice the paint peeling around the edges. For the characters, that means some of the scariest incidents occur not when they’re fighting for their lives, but when they actually have to engage in conversations.

“Of all the bars to be stuck in…” Henry Rollins’s character sighs during a lull in the mayhem, and you think, “Of all the lines he could have spoken instead of this oblique Casablanca reference…” Yet occasionally clunky dialogue is the least of our poor characters’ problems. Witness what happens when the story calls for them actually to suffer—or, worse yet, grieve. Then we’re treated to the supremely disjointed spectacle of a movie trying to be cynical and sentimental at the same time, and the results are not pretty.

On the level of sheer plot, the surprise-for-its-own-sake approach also starts to wear thin in places—does a development really count as a surprise if you just don’t care about it that much? Another downside to all the cleverness of the machinations on hand is that the merely workmanlike scenes really leap out, coming across as much more mechanical than they would in, say, a movie that breathes once in a while. In fact, things move so fast that you might not realize that you’ve already seen most of the maneuvers on display. Indeed, for a movie so aware of the standard action-horror formulae, what’s most surprising is how routine so much of it feels. Or perhaps what I’m calling routine, others may term classic, or at least “staples” of the genre. Here’s a quick test, then: if you liked the Alien movies, Dog Soldiers, and the work of John Carpenter going back to the original Assault on Precinct 13, would you enjoy seeing all these movies conflated and yet somehow condensed at the same time, stripped of backstory and shorn of subplots and nuance? Crafting homemade explosives, expeditions to high-risk areas for much-needed items, dialogue that is careful to tell us how much ammo everyone has left, debates about waiting for help versus going for help—trust me, you’ve seen it all before.

Then again, with Feast we are dealing with a siege film, and there are clearly some elements that just come with the territory. While its board-up-the-windows tactics and you’ll-be-eaten-if-you-don’t rationale instantly recall Night of the Living Dead, it’s another seminal film of the 1960s, The Birds, that came to mind for me, especially in Feast’s refreshing lack of interest in explaining where its monsters come from. In addition, some horror fans will recognize Feast as the latest entry in a subgenre of a subgenre, the roadhouse siege movie, a category that includes works like From Dusk Till Dawn, and Demon Knight. It seems that siege movies will always be popular, and as proof one need only observe how the form cuts across all genres—quick, what do Rio Bravo and Home Alone have in common? Perhaps it’s a topic for elsewhere to explore on a deeper level what exactly Americans feel they’re defending their homes or communities against in such films. For now, though, it’s probably worth mentioning that siege films superbly fulfill the Aristotelian ideal of the theater in their unity of time and place, so as audiences we’re almost hardwired to find them compelling in some way. Again: we’re under siege, too.

And lest this review becomes too abstarct, I should point out that the Fangoria crowd will not be disappointed by Feast. The movie relishes in images like maggots emerging from nostrils (of the living!), people being swallowed alive, heads getting bitten off or simply smashed into jelly, and monster and human vomit spewing forth (both in the span of a few minutes). Aside from such silliness, Feast also boasts some very solid puppetry and fx work. Anchoring it dramatically are reliable performances from vets like Balthazar Getty and Clu Gulager and these are augmented by spirited turns from several relative newcomers. The editing job is also very nice, both in how it provides a low-budget solution for heightening the impact of the action scenes and in how it ably assists Gulager play the usual director’s hide-and-seek vis-a-vis unveiling what the monsters look like. Also of note on a technical level are the sound effects, which are especially effective in denoting off-screen presences.

What you’re most left with after viewing Feast, however, is how unabashedly it plays with audience expectations. To its credit, it continues to toy with us even after we’re fully aware that this is going on—which isn’t easy. However, when this kind of gamesmanship becomes a movie’s focus, rather than providing the cathartic release that comes from deep laughter or true horror, there’s a tradeoff taking place. We’re not connecting to the onscreen action with our hearts or even with our guts anymore, only our heads. To many, that may still be a game worth playing, if only once. After all, like the characters in Feast’s opening scenes, you can’t say that you haven’t been warned.