BUFFET INFINITY (2025)

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:

A bizarre interdimensional conspiracy slowly comes into focus through a collection of local television commercials and news broadcasts documenting the suspicious growth of an increasingly unsettling restaurant chain.

Review:

Most buffet restaurants stick to foods that are easy to prepare in large quantities—pasta dishes, potatoes, salads, rice, vegetables, and other dependable staples. Buffet Infinity has no interest in being that kind of buffet. Its ever-expanding menu borders on complete absurdity, serving everything from oysters and butter chicken samosas to Jamaican jerk mahi mahi topped with caviar. The signature attraction may be an outrageously oversized burger that rivals Saturday Night Live’s legendary Taco Town sketch by stacking sushi, rigatoni, and even an octopus tentacle between two towering buns separated by what feels like a couple of feet.

As bizarre as the food sounds, it isn’t the strangest thing happening around Buffet Infinity. Ever since a massive sinkhole opened beneath the strip mall housing the restaurant, residents of the quiet town of Westridge have begun reporting increasingly disturbing events. Mysterious noises echo through the neighborhood. Household pets vanish without explanation. Soon afterward, people begin disappearing as well. Suspicion naturally falls on Buffet Infinity after the first missing person turns out to be Jenny Avery, owner of a nearby sandwich shop whose ongoing rivalry with the aggressively expanding buffet had become increasingly hostile. As the mystery grows larger, the restaurant’s strange influence begins pulling an ambulance-chasing lawyer, two bumbling pawn shop employees, a used-car salesman, and an eccentric science fiction novelist with an unusual foot fetish into a steadily unfolding conspiracy involving forces far beyond ordinary reality.

Rather than telling this story through conventional scenes, horror-comedy Buffet Infinity builds its narrative almost entirely through a constantly evolving collection of television commercials. Each advertisement reveals another small piece of the puzzle while subtly updating previous campaigns, allowing viewers to gradually assemble the larger story themselves. Watching the film feels remarkably similar to channel surfing late at night during the era when television breaks were dominated by loud local commercials featuring cowboy hats, flashing 1-800 numbers, oversized electronics, and enthusiastic announcers promising “crazy” deals between reruns of shows like Renegade and Psi-Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal. Here, however, those nostalgic advertisements slowly expose the existence of an alien invasion hiding in plain sight.

One of the funniest recurring storylines revolves around the feud between Buffet Infinity and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop. Central to their rivalry is Jenny’s famous signature sauce, which Buffet Infinity repeatedly dismisses as little more than ordinary ketchup. Jenny passionately defends the family recipe, insisting it originated with her grandmother, although even her claims of authentic Italian ancestry eventually become part of the escalating satire. As Buffet Infinity’s popularity continues to explode, the restaurant introduces its own competing sauce, forcing Jenny to slash the price of her weekly lunch specials again and again as she desperately struggles to keep her small business alive.

Appropriately enough, Buffet Infinity possesses its own secret ingredient beyond the clever premise itself: its wonderfully unconventional cast. Of the twenty-eight performers currently credited on IMDb, only a tiny handful even have profile photos, and most of the principal actors have no previous acting credits whatsoever. Their lack of professional experience ends up becoming one of the film’s greatest strengths.

Ironically, polished actors might not have delivered these performances nearly as effectively. Whether portraying a used-car salesman battling his arch-enemy “Professor High Prices” while wearing an obviously homemade superhero costume or a suburban insurance agent who accidentally causes her husband’s death, the cast embraces material designed to be awkward, ridiculous, and delightfully uncomfortable. The difference is that none of the performers overplay the comedy. Everyone clearly understands the jokes, yet nobody resorts to exaggerated facial expressions or cartoonish line deliveries. Instead, the film draws much of its humor from the performers’ genuine awkwardness, quiet sincerity, and natural discomfort in front of the camera. That understated approach makes the comedy considerably funnier while allowing the characters to feel like recognizable everyday people caught in increasingly bizarre situations.

Among the supporting players, several recurring personalities become especially memorable as the larger conspiracy unfolds. One standout is Langdon P. Hershey, once a successful author of the Serpent in the Starship novels before reinventing himself as the leader of an eccentric cult promoting neo-linguistics and crypto-numerology. The character cleverly blends elements of Jim Jones, Garth Marenghi, and late-career lounge-singer William Shatner into an unmistakably hilarious parody of L. Ron Hubbard. Another consistent source of laughs comes from billboard attorney Mosley Rosin, whose advertisements constantly change to ask whether viewers have been injured by whichever corporation, religious movement, or mysterious organization currently appears responsible for the latest wave of strange happenings around town.

Because these recurring commercial segments appear so frequently, a handful inevitably begin to feel slightly repetitive. Certain jokes return more often than their original punchlines can comfortably support, occasionally giving the impression that some material exists primarily to stretch the runtime toward feature length. Thankfully, Buffet Infinity never becomes sluggish, but there are brief stretches where forward momentum slows considerably. Eventually, the filmmakers acknowledge the limitations of their commercial-only format by breaking their own rules and including a small number of scenes that aren’t advertisements at all, providing the narrative flexibility needed to resolve lingering story threads. Around that same point, however, the mythology also becomes increasingly cryptic, leaving some viewers feeling as though the film ultimately withholds too many answers. It’s easy to imagine certain audiences concluding that the filmmakers became so fascinated by their mystery that they forgot to deliver a fully satisfying conclusion.

Even for viewers left scratching their heads by the ending, it’s difficult not to admire the sheer ambition behind the entire project. On originality alone, Buffet Infinity deserves enormous credit. Regardless of where every piece of the story ultimately lands, the framing device itself remains the movie’s greatest achievement. Writer-director Simon Glassman and his collaborators clearly invested an extraordinary amount of effort into recreating every tiny detail of regional television advertising, from the editing rhythms and low-budget production values to the unmistakable audio quality and charmingly awkward presentation. The authenticity becomes almost uncanny. Fans of unusual cult curiosities like WNUF Halloween Special will find Buffet Infinity especially rewarding, as it delivers a wonderfully strange journey through nostalgic late-night television while wrapping its retro aesthetic around an entertaining tale of extraterrestrial horror that few conventional films would ever attempt.

Review Score: 80