Movies
‘Feast 3’ Director Talks Man in Rubber Suits, Franchise
Dimension Extreme has now officially released Feast III: The Happy Finish on DVD at retailers everywhere. We caught up with director John Gulager to chat about the end of the trilogy and to reminisce about the Project Greenlight days. Read on for the skinny.
Dimension Films hired John Gulager to direct both sequels to Feast back-to-back. Both were shot in the same location.
“Oh yeah, the stuff is in the town except for the rooftop because its too dangerous. Everything else was kinda on a stage… as soon as they go into the sewers it’s all those little sets.”
When shooting the first film, they were focused solely on that film, but Gulager always knew it could be a franchise.
“[It was] just getting through that first film, but it’s a monster film, so you just figure it could have a sequel and become a franchise.” He continues, “In the original script for the original film, it didn’t stop right there… the original script was like a 40 million dollar movie [laughs], then it got paired down to a group of people in a bar. It didn’t really end where it ended, but we ended it there, where they walk out and the car drives off.”
There was a lot of speculation about the reshoots that went on before the first film was finally released. Gulager goes on record about the final budget and some changes.
“It was about $4.5m bucks, that’s over the break up of the companies and shot over a couple of [extra] days. [There was the scene with] the little bastard with the Biker (Diane Goldner) in the desert and shot the explosions – we never got the explosions [in the original].” He explains more in details, “Remember when the Harley Mom blows up in the desert? Originally it was just a red/orange light on [her] face. We never had the explosions or the reverse angle. So we built the little broken out piece of the building looking out into the desert and rebuilt the inside of that with doubles, we shot that reverse angle, we also shot the little bastard running out into the desert.“
One of the most interesting aspects of the Feast franchise is that the gimmick is anti-cliché. Gulager talks about veering off the path.
“It’s set up so you can kinda do whatever you want,” he jokes, “I always say you’re breaking a genre convention, but the thing is that we basically do whatever we want, whether we think anyone likes it or not. You know the so-called rules of horror, and what people expect…. you know if you veer off that path at all, you’re messing with the genre anyways, so yeah, I dunno, it’s pretty clever that-that’s what these films are about.”
Anyone who has seen the Feast films knows that it’s a guy in a rubber suit movie. Gulager explained that it was not as fun as it sounds (for the people inside the suit) and also chats about filming a horror movie in the daylight, as opposed to at night.
“That was one of those things that you do what you don’t expect. We thought it would be kind of neat to shoot a monster movie during the day — although I was watching The Host again and it took place during the day.
“If you’re trying to make scary movie, you put it in the dark so you’re kind of filling in the blanks on horrible this monster really is. But that’s not what we were trying to do with these. We were trying to make it a little more Hard Days Night and a little less Halloween.”
Gulager then chats briefly about his love for the rubber suits. “In my world it gives a certain charm to have guys in rubber suits, but I know a lot of people had a lot of problems with that, even though it’s a man in a rubber suit movie. I grew up with The Creature from the Black Lagoon and stuff like that.” He continues, “Rubber suits are hot, the monsters could only run for a little bit of time and would have to sit down on folding chairs with fans and maybe get a little oxygen. It’s not that easy.”
When Feast 2 came out, a lot of people said to me that you have to see it with an audience. Gulager reacts to this notion with talk about how the internet disrupts the fun he sees in watching a film.
“You just make a movie and however people watch ‘em… although I have to say,” changing thoughts, “I’ll read stuff on the internet and go ‘I watched it up until… and then I had to come and write on the internet about it and now I’m going to go back and watch some more.’ What a bizarre way to watch a movie,” he exclaims with honest confusion. “What a bizarre turn the culture took, you know, as far as not only watching a movie but feeling you have to be the critic instantly and tell people what you think. It just seems strange… I like when you go to a theater… I don’t walk out of movies. “
If you guys stick around for Feast III: The Happy Finish, there could me more in the pipeline.
“This is it right now, it hasn’t even come out yet… [although,] there’s already a script for another one, but you know… we’ll see.”
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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