Movie Review: Buffet Infinity

It’s exciting to encounter a movie that feels like something you’ve never seen before, and Simon Glassman’s Buffet Infinity definitely fits that bill. Made up of low budget local TV commercials and snippets of news broadcasts, it’s one of the more unique concepts for a movie to come along in recent years and while it isn’t totally successful, it works better than one might expect.

The fictional borough of Westridge County is home to Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, which features its popular secret sauce as their main selling point. They share a plaza with Pet ‘N Play and Brooks Electronics, which sees the arrival of new restaurant Buffet Infinity shortly after a sinkhole appears in the parking lot. A rivalry quickly forms between the two businesses but something seems strange about the buffet, most notably the apparent lack of any staff. That doesn’t seem to hinder their growth however, and soon the buffet is taking over more and more of the strip mall and people begin to go missing.

It’s a ludicrous premise and the script by Glassman with Allison Bench and Elisia Snyder fully leans into the absurdity, often to very funny effect. The performances are pretty universally terrible but purposefully so, perfectly recreating the cheesy, DIY ethos of regional TV spots from the 80s and 90s.

Seemingly disparate at the outset, by the end everything winds up being connected in interesting ways. Combined with the general strangeness of the story, it’s hard not to keep watching just to see where it could possibly all be headed, though the overall conceit does start to feel stretched a bit thin by the end, making me wonder if it might not have worked better as a segment in the V/H/S anthology franchise. Regardless, it’s a pretty audacious swing that, while not without flaws, winds up being largely successful. It’s definitely not going to be to everyone’s liking, but I could see this pretty easily building up a cult following, much like famous Westridge author Langdon P. Hershey. ★★★½