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Feed (Unearthed Films) Blu-ray Review

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    Ian Jane
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  • Feed (Unearthed Films) Blu-ray Review

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    Released by: Unearthed Films
    Released on: January 21st, 2025.
    Director: Brett Leonard
    Cast: Alex O'Loughlin, Gabby Millgate, Jack Thompson, Patrick Thompson
    Year: 1990
    Purchase From Amazon

    Feed –Movie Review:

    Richard (Patrick Thompson of Man-Thing) works for the Australian police in Sydney where he and his partner spend their days tracking down perverts on the internet. When his investigation leads him to Germany where he busts a man feeding himself to a cannibal, his world gets a little shaken, but he returns home and manages to find it in him to have rough sex with his hot bi-sexual girlfriend, Jesse (the gorgeous Marika Aubrey) anyway. When he gets back to work he stumbles upon a site that seems to cater to those who are into, how shall we say this, big women – not curvy women or voluptuous women or even chubby women but really, really big women – six hundred-pounders and up.

    He pokes around the site a little bit and after some clever, if completely unrealistic, hacking tricks he manages to get into it and he starts trying to figure out what it's all about. Why are these women having their vital statistic shown online? Their pulse rates wouldn't interest your average pervert and Richard clues into the fact that something is wrong here. He tries to get permission from his boss to go to Ohio where the site is being hosted but his boss denies his request and sends him on a leave of absence – it seems Richard is getting too wound up in this case for his own good. When, after a night of particularly rough stuff with the little lady, he wakes up and finds the word 'PIG' written on his chest and his girlfriend nowhere to be found, he figures 'what the Hell' and he books it across the ocean to take on the case and sort this all out, permission be damned.

    His investigation leads him to a man named Michael Carter (Alex O'Laughlin, also of Man-Thing) who, after losing his mother at a young age, was raised by a local priest only to be kicked out of the house for reasons best not discussed for fear of spoiling the plot. Richard tracks him down and starts putting the pieces of the puzzle together and what he finds is, in a word, despicable. Carter is into some seriously messed up stuff, and to say that the man has issues would be a vast understatement.

    Directed by Brett Leonard, the man behind The Lawnmower Man and, believe it or not, Man-Thing, and written by Kieran Galvin, Feed plays around with a lot of great ideas but ultimately gets buried in its own hyper-stylized cinematography and postproduction editing tweaks. The film benefits from some truly repulsive and harrowing scenes but the bleached-out colors suck the life out of them sometimes, which has the unfortunate effect of diminishing the scare factor that they should have had and would have had if the picture maintained a more organic look during these set pieces. While the flash-cut editing and wide-open photography might have sounded like a good way to give the film a hot and greasy look, instead it kills a lot of the detail that should have made it look rotten and foul.

    Adding to the lesser aspects of the film are a few pieces of the script that are just flat out unbelievable. While the scene where Richard approaches the preacher's daughter might have sounded good on paper, the fact that in this day and age she so willfully befriends him and divulges personal information without any fear or suspicion whatsoever is a little too much to swallow. Sure, she's a 'bigger girl,' as she says, and therefore might appreciate the attention he bestows upon her, but she'd have to be a moron in addition to being a little larger than average to tell him everything that she does in this film.

    Thankfully the film isn't a complete disaster. The performances from Thompson and, in particular, O'Laughlin, are both great. Thompson brings some genuine angst and frustration to his role and he's fantastic in the finale, while O'Laughlin is completely sinister but never over the top in a super-villain sort of way. He's subtle, sneaky, and smart and he makes for a great antagonist to Thompsons's character. Gabby Millgate, who dons a fairly realistic fat suit when she plays Deirdre (one of the women in Carter's care), is also quite good in a role that could have very easily turned into a parody or caricature. When she flips out at the end of the movie you can believe that she is as upset as the story tells her she should be, making the ending all the more disturbing.

    The scenes wherein the mystery begins to unfold for Richard as his life falls apart around him are also handled well. While the cut-cut-cut of the editing during these moments would give Russ Meyer and aneurism, they do manage to bring a sense of chaos and disorder to these scenes, which seems wholly appropriate given what occurs. We see Richard's own perversions and all too human flaws come to light as he finally throws in the towel and follows his gut to do what's right, rather than what his job dictates. It's an interesting comparison that Leonard makes here, and a rather effective one at that.

    The highly touted 'gross out' factor of the film isn't quite as intense as the hyperbole on the packaging would have you believe but Feed is definitely not for the faint of heart. A blurb from Fangoria claims 'one of the sickest films I've ever seen' on the cover art but how 'sick' it really is will depend completely on what disturbs you. If it's blood and gore you're after there's really very little here, but if the site of (fake) morbid obesity and/or grotesque eating habits makes you queasy then, yes, Feed might prove upsetting.

    Feed – Blu-ray Review:

    Feed arrives on region A Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high-definition transfer framed at 1.85.1 widescreen looking as good as it probably can given that it was shot on early 2000s-era HD cameras. The colors are intentionally boosted here, making things look oversaturated, sometimes at the cost of detail. This is how the movie looked on DVD, so it stands to reason that it was intentional on the part of the filmmakers, but don’t expect the type of detail, depth and texture you’d get from a 1080p presentation of a more traditional looking film. Still, this does look a lot better than that aforementioned DVD, particularly in close up shots and color reproduction. Black levels are solid, and the image is stable throughout. The screen caps below give you a pretty accurate representation of what the movie looks like on this disc.

    English language audio options are provided in 16-bit DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio and 24-bit LPCM 2.0 Stereo with removable subtitles provided in English and English SDH flavors. Go for the 5.1 mix if you’ve got the hardware to handle it. There are strong bass levels here as well as clean and clear dialogue, great surround usage, and nice channel separation. The musical score, which plays a big part in the effectiveness of a few key scenes, sounds really good and packs quite a bit of punch at times, as do the sound effects. The stereo track also sounds fine, but it isn’t as engrossing as the 5.1 mix is.

    Extras start off with a commentary by Director Brett Leonard where he notes that some of the ideas featured in the movie are based on actual events and how disturbing it was to do some of the researched needed to create this film, how Alex O'Loughlin and Patrick Thompson came to him with the idea for the movie, how feederism is a rebellion against society's ideal of a perfect body type, his brother Greg Leonard's work scoring the movie, some of the stranger background details featured in the movie, reconstructing some of the details of real-life German cannibal Armin Meiwes's case for the movie, challenges in casting the film, how the movie portrays what's normal and what's not normal and how it makes us question this, memories of shooting specific scenes, shooting the movie using an HD camera rather than on film, the special effects needed for the movie, why people find certain scenes disturbing despite the fact that the don't really contain any violence or harm to the characters, intentionally pushing the audience's buttons with some of the choices he made during the making of the movie, if this is a horror film or not, locations that were used for the movie, how audiences responded to certain parts of the movie, what went into designing some of the props used for the movie like the very specific bed featured in key scenes, metaphors used throughout the movie, how proud he is of the work he and his team did on the movie and plenty more.

    Also included on the disc is the U.S. Cut of Feed, offered with a temp sound mix and a dual mono mix. This version runs 1:31:06 as compared to the feature version at 1:40:57 and it's presented in an AVC encoded 720p presentation using up just under 6GBs of space, with both of those audio options offered up in Dolby Digital 2.0. Obviously it doesn’t look or sound as good as the feature version but it’s nice to have this alternate cut included on the disc for all the Feed completists out there.

    First up, in terms of supplements, is a selection of ten deleted scenes and an alternate ending. While the deleted scenes were likely cut for pacing reasons as they don't add a whole lot to the core story aside from some more detailed character bits, the alternate ending does put a completely different slant on the final moments of the film and gives things a more conspiratorial edge. While the ending that Leonard chose for the film is the better of the two that were shot, it's still interesting to see this here and it makes you think a little bit. Optional commentary from Leonard is available over these scenes, providing context as to where they’d have been in the feature version and why he chose to remove them from the final cut of the movie.

    Not enough? And additional forty-one-minutes of deleted and extended scenes are also included here, a fair bit of which focuses on the investigation aspects and the various relationships that are featured in the movie, but there’s some extra violence in here and some footage that was meant to be used towards the end of the movie that is interesting to see. An additional eleven minutes of outtakes are also found here – clearly a whole lot of material was shot for this movie that wound up on the cutting room floor!

    Carried over from the original DVD release is t four-minute Final Day Interview With Director Brett Leonard which sees the filmmaker talk about how he feels about wrapping up most of the principal filming but also noting how he's got a crew coming to his house the next day to shoot additional footage. He also talks about the aggressive schedule that the movie was being made under, the morality of the story and how it approaches 'normal' relationship and the reality behind some of the situations presented in the movie and the body types portrayed.

    A few more supplements are carried over from the original DVD release, starting with three more interviews, one a piece with stars Alex O'Loughlin and Jack Thompson, and producer Melissa Beauford. These are reasonably interesting despite a few instances of self-congratulatory talking head discourse as we get a feel for what it was like on set as well as for some of the postproduction efforts that went into creating the atmosphere and the mood that Leonard wanted for the film.

    Rounding out the supplements is a nine-minute clip of footage from the film's premiere in Philadelphia, twenty-eight-minutes of some interesting if rather random fly-on-the-wall style behind-the-scenes footage, an amusing eight-minute infomercial parody, a still gallery and an original theatrical trailer for the feature. Animated menus and chapter stops are also included.

    Feed – The Final Word:

    Despite its flaws, and there are a few, Feed is a decent thriller that at least tries something different within the 'cops vs. serial killers' genre. Unearthed Films has done a nice job bringing the movie to Blu-ray on a disc that’s stacked with extra features.



    Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Feed Blu-ray screen caps!

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