Feed (2005) - a review

***WARNING THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS, AND ALSO DISCUSSES SOME OF THE UNPLEASANTNESS IN THAT FILM 'FEED' WHAT I DID WATCH... EVEN THOUGH I DIDN'T WRITE IT YET, I KNOW THAT AM PROBABLY GOING TO SWEAR AND USE WORDS REFERRING TO  'MAN PARTS'... (although probably just the one time... right near the beginning)***

"hi i'm patrick thompson, son of actor jack thompson, you may remember me from films such as 'man-thing' (2005), the seventh floor (1994), and that glorious piece 'feed' (2005) where i play a blonde very poorly adjusted individual..."

right-on, and i'm the thang-shakin' fatbwoi, and for one night only i am reprising my role as film-critic/movie-review-bod for your personal delectation...

i haven't reviewed a film for at least 13 years, the last one i did was whilst writing for the sixth form magazine i edited back in concrete-cowland all those moons ago... it was a review of 'legends of the fall', and as i recall, i got in a lot of trouble with some of the people at college as it was a-bit down on brad pitt... oh and i revealed the ending (he gets munched by a bear)... although in hind-sight, it may have been the tone in which i discussed the ending (over-celebratory i believe would be a pretty damn applicable term)...

far out... thus, bwoi gone get all barry norman (like in that sepultura track)...

name - Feed

released - 2005

cert - 18

starring - Alex O'Loughlin, Patrick Thompson, Gabby Millgate...

"Provocative, shocking and utterly compelling, FEED is a daring, stylish and totally uncompromising psychological thriller that employs the conventions of the serial killer genre to tackle the controversial world of internet voyeurism" 

...yeah man, that's what it says on the box, and that's a stall pretty well set-out right about there, and a big ole claim to boot...

verdict? fail... let's get this right out there... the internet is literally a plot tool to get all these people together, essentially super-cyber-cop in sydney finds dubious site where evil goes on via his magic computer skills (its what our hero does, seamlessly, he only just finished the last bust...), gets shut down by site owner (psycho) who is also a computer whizz... tells boss, who doesn't believe him... goes rogue, gets on a plane to america and there-in the films tenuous exploration of internet voyeurism ends... that's maybe half an hour in

but enough, let's back-up a bit... and see what happens at the beginning...

cops raid house, there's a penis in a pan (!!!) ...they go upstairs, there's a dude eating another dude in the bath-tub (i'm fairly sure it's the latter's johnson) who then starts wailing 'i want to be eaten'...

as intro's go, esp for this kind of shock horror business, its not bad... out-classed by every 'saw', but then the assumption is that this is aiming for a different kind of market. although penis in a pan less than a couple of minutes in is pretty out there...

...and then it gets a bit weird.

we cut between scenes of a very large lady being fed by her impossibly buff tattoos-drawn-on man-friend and hero cop at work or having dysfunctional sex with his slightly weird (and extremely sexually charged) girlfriend...

characterisation is as thin as shit... you can get away with it with the psychopath character because that's just the way they are...

where i struggle is when the hero cop insists on looking at evil porn all day, and then saddling himself with a weird-nympho girlfriend who quite obviously has some serious issues... and what's with the brutal random sex... the man is himself an argument for desensitisation through repeated exposure... this may be the point, but tbh i pretty much don't give a shit about him as he comes across as a bit of a tosser...

from here-on in, there are no more 'penis in a pan' moments, and it becomes a film about feeders and gainers (blondey-psycho-man is feeding his girls to death *shock horror* ...i don't know if that's actually giving anything away, as its pretty obvious, and it says it on the box)... which brings me to the second problem...

the characterisation of deidre is also thin (no pun intended) but this is not the problem... no, the problem is that  she spends the whole film wearing a scarf or other neck garment whilst laid in bed... and it just looks like its there to mask the join in the fat-suit... which is pretty darn impressive as fat suits go...

i spent the whole film thinking i recognised her... and whilst i decided early on that the psycho looked a bit like the dopey one out of 'beverly hills cop', it took me a while to click that she was in 'muriel's wedding'...

so yeah, once the net voyeurism angle has been exploited as much as it ever will... we move into typical (if hammy) psychological thriller territory... where the hero and the villain attempt to out manoeuvre each other around a small american town...

what i don't get is, that if your tracking a psycho round small town, and then he turns up at your motel room in the morning and offers you coffee and a burger.... why the fuck do you eat it? stoopid policeman. (it seems that michael the psycho always buys his burgers from the same place... do they not wonder why this dude appears to eat so many burgers?!)

i'm not going to give away the ending... i've learnt my lesson, and if you can deal with 'penis in a pan' and 'shit on a plate' its worth a watch... if you've seen 'fight club' you'll see the twist/reveal coming miles and miles away... the flashbacks are a bit lame, one might even say cheesey, but as an well-weird romp goes - they'll suffice...

the end also has another lil' twist, with a touch of the stilton about it, but its nicely done... there is a lovely tableau in there that i bet had some film-student somewhere creaming himself for weeks...

so there you have it... worth a watch (if you're into that kind of thing), although not a stand-out in its genre... for me it didn't live up to all the claims of 'shocking' 'uncomfortable' etc on the box... but it was pretty fucking weird... esp during the first 40mins, when the strands are still a bit maelstrom-y and haven't yet resolved themselves from a collection of mad images into a story...

the story itself is ok... but not as clever as it thinks it is...

pros - deidre's neck-wear, that bloke from beverly hills cop, the twist

cons - penis in a pan, the flashbacks