Studio: Yellow Veil Pictures
Director: Simon Glassman
Writer: Simon Glassman
Producer: Michael Peterson, Allison Bench, Simon Glassman
Stars: Kevin Singh, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, Brandon Vanderwall, Claire Theobald, Siobhan Theobald, Allison Bench
Review Score:
Summary:
An otherworldly conspiracy unfolds across a series of small-town newsclips and TV commercials chronicling a suspicious restaurant’s aggressive expansion.
Review:
Buffet restaurants typically serve items that work well in big batches, like pastas, potatoes, salads, rice, and various vegetables. Buffet Infinity isn’t a typical restaurant. Their ever-growing menu is more robust, and totally ridiculous, offering up dishes that include oysters, butter chicken samosas, Jamaican jerk mahi mahi topped with caviar, and a towering burger that gives Saturday Night Live’s Taco Town a run for its money by piling sushi, rigatoni, and an octopus tentacle between two buns at least two feet apart.
That’s not what makes Buffet Infinity so unusual though. Ever since a massive sinkhole appeared in the strip mall where the restaurant operates, locals in the small town of Westridge have heard strange sounds. Pets have inexplicably vanished. People have disappeared too, and it certainly seems suspicious that the first person to go missing is Jenny Avery, owner of a nearby sandwich shop, right at the height of her rivalry with Buffet Infinity’s hostile assimilation of area businesses. Whatever weirdness the restaurant may be up to, their aggressive expansion also ropes in an ambulance-chasing attorney, a pair of pawnshop stooges, a used-car salesman, and a sci-fi author with a foot fetish as a peculiar interdimensional conspiracy gradually unfolds.
With its tongue tight against its cheek, horror-comedy “Buffet Infinity” chronicles the titular establishment’s rise not as a traditional movie, but through an eclectic collection of commercials where a story forms from new details added into updated advertisements. The experience feels a lot like flipping through late-night TV at a time when loud guys in cowboy hats, blinking 1-800 numbers, and big boomboxes hawked at “crazy” prices dominated ad breaks during reruns of “Renegade” and “Psi-Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal,” except these clips become puzzle pieces that eventually expose a secret alien takeover.
One of the big beefs between Buffet Infinity and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop involves Jenny’s signature sauce, which Buffet Infinity claims is mostly ketchup. Jenny insists the secret recipe came from her grandmother, whose authentic Italian heritage also gets called into question. Buffet Infinity, the restaurant, invents a competing sauce as it booms in popularity, forcing Jenny to continually lower the price of her Wednesday lunch special as she fights to keep her doors open.
“Buffet Infinity,” the movie, has its own secret ingredient, which is its grab-bag cast of ordinary people playing the mildly kooky characters. Of the 28 actors currently listed on the film’s IMDb page, only three of them even have photos. None of the main members have any other acting credits under their names either, and their inexperience shows in the best way possible.
Trained professionals couldn’t handle this same material as well as these amateurs do. From the auto dealer who fights his nemesis “Professor High Prices” in a homemade superhero costume to the insurance-selling housewife who accidentally kills her husband, “Buffet Infinity” scripts bits to be humorously cringy, lowkey outrageous, or mixed amounts of both. But instead of anyone winking at the camera with over-the-top cartoonishness, the movie siphons inherent awkwardness out of natural nerdiness and camera shyness. The performers are in on the jokes, yet they don’t have any instincts to unnecessarily exaggerate antics for increased comedic effect. Not only does the overall sense of humor stay smartly subdued as a result, the affable actors remain relatable as everyday people having quirky fun without having to ham it up.
In addition to those already mentioned, other notable roles whose individual arcs help shape the evolving plot include Langdon P. Hershey, a man who made his name writing the “Serpent in the Starship” book series before becoming a cult guru peddling neo-linguistics and crypto-numerology. Hershey also has swatches of Jim Jones, Garth Marenghi, and crooner-period William Shatner coloring his spot-on L. Ron Hubbard parody. Meanwhile, billboard lawyer Mosley Rosin gets a good pinch of screentime by regularly changing his “have you been injured by” target to the business association, fringe religious group, or other entity currently influencing odd events across town.
Because of their frequency, some of these segments can come across as filler that reappears more often than a sometimes single-note gag can sustain. “Buffet Infinity” doesn’t ever really drag, although the minutes that don’t advance anything occasionally waft the scent of fighting to reach a feature-length runtime. By its end, the movie realizes the format can only take it so far, so the film cheats with a couple of scenes that aren’t commercials in order to wrap up loose ends that probably couldn’t have been tied any other way. Around this same point, the fiction starts drowning in cryptic-ness likely to leave some viewers feeling like they still don’t know what’s going on, and they might suspect the movie’s makers gave up on giving out a narratively satisfying conclusion.
Even those viewers, however, have to appreciate the monumental effort that went into making this movie and the creative risks taken to turn it into an enjoyably askew experience. Purely on strength of concept and uniqueness in execution, “Buffet Infinity” earns four stars, regardless of where the story’s dart hits the board. This is an original idea where the framing device holds higher importance anyway, and writer/director Simon Glassman and his collaborators inarguably put in a Herculean amount of work to recreate the audio, editing, and authentic feel of regional advertising that’s weirder than anyone would imagine. For fans of niche curiosities like “WNUF Halloween Special,” “Buffet Infinity” offers a can’t-miss, trippy trip through after-hours TV and amusing extraterrestrial terror that an ordinary movie wouldn’t dare dabble in.
Review Score: 80
The experience feels a lot like flipping through late-night TV at a time when loud guys in cowboy hats and blinking 1-800 numbers dominated ad breaks.