Buffet Infinity

It's entirely possible, even if you're a huge horror fan, to have not come across analog horror. It's a subgenre that mostly exists on YouTube. It's an offshoot of found footage, taking the form of old TV broadcasts. The story is relayed through broadcast signal intrusion, with visual static and old VHS-style graphics, is often cryptic about its overarching story, and told episodically (usually in videos a few minutes in length). Instead of going for outright terror, it usually more focuses on dread and unease, with cosmic horror and extra-dimensional threats being the primary source of horror. YouTube channel Local 58 is one of the most notable, and highly I recommend it. Buffet Infinity takes that concept and ambitiously looks to apply it to a feature length movie. The first two thirds of the movie are a series of commercials and news broadcasts in a small town in Canada. The titular restaurant opens up in a strip mall and launches an aggressive and occasionally bizarre ad campaign, and competing businesses respond. News reports are sprinkled in filling in some plot details. Then ads for a Scientology-like cult start airing. With this explanation, I feel like this movie needs a different format to review it properly. So I'm going to give each element a section and break down its good and bad aspects. THE FORMAT It is a bold choice to take analog horror's traditional format of shorts under ten minutes and stitch it together to feature length. Visually, they nail the aesthetic; scan lines and that old chunky VHS font are everywhere, the on-screen graphics are time-appropriate, businesses with bigger budgets produce better commercials, the acting has that local commercial charm, and they nail the overall feel of TV broadcasts. Until the third act, when they abandon the TV broadcast format for a more traditional narrative-driven format, but perplexingly stick with the visual aesthetics. It's jarring and feels like they got to a point where they realized they couldn't keep it up anymore. But that begs the question of why use the format at all if you can't be consistent from start to finish. Also, the format can be tiring. With the footage flipping every 10-30 seconds, you think more time passes than it does. I found myself looking at the time a lot, and it started to get irksome. THE THEMES Aside from the horror aspect, Buffet Infinity has a strong anti-consumerism, anti-big business message. It is not subtle at all about positioning mega-corps as malicious, omnivorous, mindless entities that destroy the identity and soul of communities with their faceless storefronts and business interests that seem to cover every facet of human life. And it is not subtle about it at all; this is a direct, blatant shot across the bow that the whiny "I don't like politics in my movie" crowd will not appreciate, especially if they cape for corporations. But being unsubtle also means being blunt, and Buffet Infinity is as blunt and unrefined as a Twitter argument. If this movie were a person, they'd be that terminally online asshole who seems to live in a constant state of outrage. If you're a fan of the show Community, this movie is Britta Perry. I'm all for this movie's message, but it's delivered in such a way that it mutes the effectiveness of the message's content. I could practically feel the words "wake up, sheeple" being yelled in my ear. THE SCRIPT Like a lot of analog horror, Buffet Infinity goes for some cosmic, extra-dimensional horror, drip-feeding it along the way towards the third act. It's the kind of movie you really have to pay attention to so you get lost in the weeds, noticing the small details on the text crawl at the bottom or pause-to-read fine print that adds to the building tension. But it never spoon-feeds you the answers either. There's enough detail to get the gist, but enough mystery to burrow in your brain and give you the creeps. There may be, though, too much mystery. There are a ton of unanswered questions that Buffet Infinity has no interest in explaining, and at a certain point, those ignored questions become impossible to set aside as a viewer. I don't need every question answers -- ambiguity can be quite an effective weapon in horror -- but when the questions outweigh the answers, it becomes a problem. Even basic ones like "what are we watching?". This seems to be a videotape of someone channel-hopping, but weeks if not months of time elapse, so it can't be that. And there's the aforementioned switch from TV broadcasts to third-person narrative in the final act. THE AMBITION I have to give credit Simon Glassman and the crew for taking this format big. There is no movie like this. Even something like WNUF Halloween Special, which presents itself as a videotaped broadcast, is supposed to be a continuous broadcast on one night, telling its story in near-real-time. Buffet Infinity aims much higher, and using the segments to talk to and reference each other (even if no station in the world would air some of the commercials this has). But ambition is not a marker of success. It is inventive, but at a certain point, I felt like the movie was out over its skis, and it never found a way to get back. I'm not sure Buffet Infinity wouldn't have worked better as a series of properly expanded YouTube shorts instead of the ADHD channel-surfing format here. And that's to say nothing of the fact that the plot itself has none of the ambition of the format. It is, like Local 58, Gemini Home Entertainment, and just about every other YouTube analog horror series, a cosmic horror story with extra-dimensional monsters threatening humanity. Overall, I will score Buffet Infinity above average, as I have a lot of respect for what they were trying to do, and how effective two-thirds of the movie was at maintaining the aesthetic The format makes this a tricky recommendation, as it is going to be barrier to entry to many, but I'd still encourage people to give it a try ... provided you haven't watched a lot of analog horror already. For those of us who have, Buffet Infinity might live up to its title in being too much of a good thing.