Bitter Feast

An uptight cooking show host and head restaurant chef (LeGros)loses his jobs and takes his revenge on the critic (Leonard)that caused his downfall. After a scathing review from food critic JT Franks causes chef Peter Grey to lose his job at his restaurant, and the cancellation of his show, Grey kidnaps Franks and the torture begins. It sounds pretty cheesy but Grey reads reviews Franks has given and forces him to do better in order to eat the food he is preparing. The movie is slow moving in parts but overall a pretty good movie to watch. I was going to give it a B- mainly because the torture movie genre is all the same, but the last 20 minutes strayed away from the aspects that made this seem different and into "really, they are doing this??!".The ending brought the grade down, it could have been so much better. I give it a C.

This movie reminded me of Vincent Price's 'Theatre Of Blood', only not as fun.

This movie is well acted, and has a very dark sense of humour. It could have been an excellent movie, if only the back-stories of the main characters were a little less hackneyed.

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.

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!

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.