Bitter Feast

I have seen one of Joe Maggio's previous films, Virgil Bliss, and his style of story telling appealed to be then as it does now.

Hollywood spends millions, yet Mr. Maggio can put a film together for $6,000 apparently. Wonder what they really spend the money on.

James LeGros is excellent, supported by a strong script and a good story. I liked this from the beginning until almost the end (don't want to spoil it).

Lots of interesting dialog and James LeGros' cool intensity won me over.

I don't like a lot of movies, but I certainly like this one.

Unlike some other capture/torture movies which focus more on torture than anything else (like an extremely overrated The Loved Ones), this one is mostly about revenge and capturer making a point. In this case one pretentious rich asshole proving another asshole what he doesn't deserve to call himself a restaraunt critic. Practically all characters in the movie are assholes except the critic's wife, so you just wish both of male leads just kill each other in some assholish 1-vs-1 standout.

It's a decent thriller with the actual story and it's interesting enough to watch it at least once. The ending is not believable, but made so for the quite ironic scene.

Peter Grey is a pompous, talented chef whose life is about to take a turn for the worse after an unnecessarily horrible review by blogger JT Franks. Grey's already skewed world perspective changes drastically as he resolves to kidnap Franks, torturing him with a series of seemingly simple cooking tasks.

Bitter Feast gets points for originality and gloss. The film looks quite good for an independent effort and the actors really throw themselves into the roles. They actually hired actors, not faces, to flesh out the interesting script. James Le Gros especially never goes over the top but plays the role rather subtly and Josh Lucas is excellent, being sympathetic and unsympathetic all at once. The always reliable Larry Fessenden shows up as a slimy private eye trying to locate Franks.

Don't expect your life to change, but if you're looking for a movie with some originality and panache, then dig in!

I dislike "blood and guts" movies, and only saw this one because I was channel surfing, thought it was about a guy and his cooking show, and was drawn in by the time I realized its genre.

For a low budget movie, I'm surprised at how good the lead actors were, and that even though both characters were impossible to like, they had strong chemistry together and there was palpable suspense over what would happen next.

Surprisingly, the dialog was well-written, and there was some very dark comedy in there. The tasks that the captor demanded were not complicated nor incredible, but rather simply creative ways to make the critic "eat his words." Some of the negative reviews in here lament that there was not enough blood and/or guts/gore, but there was enough intensity and thrills created, without having to show every bloody detail.

I found this to be a suspenseful, well-acted independent film.

Apparently, this movie is low budget, but I couldn't tell. I wish I could say that about every independent movie I see! The other reviews are spot on: this is a very good movie, with a tasteful, somewhat fresh spin on the revenge movie, bucking the recent trend of gross-out, "torture porn" films. There's no actual torture in this movie, though it's implied and almost certainly is happening, off-camera. Some might be disappointed by this. Myself, I find it somewhat refreshing to watch a revenge movie that focuses more on psychological horror, story, and pacing, rather than buckets of fake blood. Don't get me wrong; I like buckets of fake blood as much as the next guy (I liked the first Saw movie, for instance), but much of that genre is based on titillating people who get off on graphic displays of violence, frequently with a strong misogynist subtext. I'm glad that the genre horror has more life to it than that.

Everything in this movie was quite good, though I might have tweaked the story here and there, to highlight certain themes a little stronger and to give a little more time to the very interesting conflict between the two leads. Overall, though, I liked it quite a lot, and I recommend it to anyone who likes darker dramas, revenge movies, and/or independent cinema. There's so much to like here, that you'll easily overlook any flaws.