BUFFET INFINITY Review: They've Got The Sauce

Simon Glassman’s Buffet Infinity is one of those movies that defies categorization and can’t be easily pigeonholed.

 

Technically, it’s a found-footage movie; but it’s also, in a way, a screenlife movie. But then again, it’s gloriously retro and ignores modern technology altogether. That’s when writing about it becomes a challenge, even for seasoned film writers who think they’ve seen it all – until something like this comes along.

 

Buffer Infinity is a horror movie. It’s about a small town being swallowed up by some sort of otherwordly cult. It’s a tale of cosmic horror, and it’s told entirely through fictional news clips and cheap commercials, the kind you might see on public access or regional affiliates, especially during the 80s and 90s.

 

It’s disorienting at first, perfectly mimicking the experience of channel surfing late at night or early in the morning and being too tired to make sense of all the sounds and images. If you stumbled onto something like this at three in the morning while crashing on the couch, you could even believe it’s real; Glassman’s recreations are amazingly faithful to the real thing, even down to the faulty VHS tracking effects.

 

As the clips are played relentlessly one after the other, a narrative begins to take shape: the story of the fictional town of Westridge, Alberta, and of the growing rivalry between the “Mom n’ Pop” Jenny’s Sandwhiches (sic) shop, and the ever-expanding and aptly named Buffet Infinity, which probably also has a kitchen sink on the menu. Smear campaigns from both sides come fast, more apt for political parties than small businesses. 

 

At first, this is just about meeting the town’s oddball residents; there’s Captain Savings the car salesman and his arch-enemy, Professor High Price, Ahmed the rapping pawn shop owner (who can’t rap), and a deadpan attorney who tends to overshare. These are the same type of weirdos you’ve probably seen on your TV set more than once; it’s just too bad they couldn’t find room for Morrie and his wig shop. It quickly becomes a satirical view of small businesses being pushed out by large corporations, with quality almost always taking a nosedive. 

 

But then the paranoia starts to slowly creep in; a sketchy religious leader who also sings and writes cheesy sci-fi novels (bonus points if you can guess who they’re taking shots at here) starts to pop up, a sinkhole appears, people start disappearing, the town is being taken over by some Lovecraftian eldritch abomination and you’re left staring at a guy with an eyeball where his crotch should be. 

 

If Glassman had gone with a conventional narrative, we’d have a modest little thriller, probably something you’ve seen several times before and forgot about afterwards. But the real genius is telling all of this through low-budget commercials, a move that only hints at otherwordly horrors and lets the viewer’s imagination do the rest; It’s fun to search through every frame just to find the tiny clues that there’s something really off about this everyday transmission.

 

The cast is admirably committed to the gimmick, even if by the end the movie cheats on its own rules in order to have the story actually progress. But for large parts of its running time, Buffet Infinity is an endlessly creative and bizarre way to tell a horror story, the kind of original idea movies need more of. This is definitely a buffet worth sampling.