BUFFET INFINITY (2025)

New streaming on Amazon Prime from Yellow Veil Pictures and Peterson Polaris!
Directed by Simon Glassman.
Written by Allison Bench, Simon Glassman, Elisia Snyder.
Check out the trailer here!

Through a series of commercials and public news announcements, BUFFET INFINITY tells the story of a strange portal manifesting behind two competing restaurants and its slow takeover of life as we know it.

I love it when films attempt to tell a story in a new format. And while telling a tale by interlacing mixed media has been done before, BUFFET INFINITY feels like something new, challenging, and refreshing. Reminiscent of the frantic pace of Adult Swim’s late night, mania-inducing shows on ADULT SWIM, specifically Casper Kelly’s TOO MANY COOKS and his YULE LOG films, with a little bit of TIM & ERIC’S AWESOME SHOW, GREAT JOB! and a heaping helping of the short film GREAT CHOICE, where people become conscious they are trapped for eternity in a repetitious commercial, is INFINITY BUFFET. The film tells a complete and nihilistic story of the world being taken over by a benevolent force only using commercials to tell the tale.

BUFFET INFINITY starts out innocent enough as an omniscient person with a remote-control flips through channels and winds up watching commercials more than actual shows—an infuriating experience I have had before where I myself feel I’ve been caught up in my own special hell. But as these commercials and news reports go on, it becomes clear that these commercials, meant to instruct you to buy products and purchase services, are being used as a means of manipulation by those not looking out for your well-being. Slowly the mention of a sinkhole behind the building is worked in at the tail end of some commercials, a sinkhole that is widening as the film goes on. Then reports of missing people start popping up amidst commercials offering new deals on newly processed foods. Strange men in black begin to float in the skies of the small town. Soon, what is being depicted as normal in all these commercials shows a life of servitude, isolation, and devoid of any kind of free choice.

BUFFET INFINITY is a wonderfully clever take on modern marketing and media manipulation, utilizing themes only touched upon in John Carpenter’s classic THEY LIVE, where lives are influenced subtly at first and then altered all at once. This slow descent into a dystopian nightmare never feels like it takes a leap too large. The genius lays in the way the tension and subliminal messaging is amped up ever so slowly over the span of 90-minutes.

It takes a lot of talent to ape the style of so many different types of commercials; from lawyer ads, to restaurant commercials, to drug endorsements, to news reports, but director Simon Glassman and his co-writers Allison Bench and Elisia Snyder are able to replicate the feel of both home-made local commercials and ones seen from bigger ad campaigns. Commercials have been demonized for decades. No one likes to sit through them, and many pay good money not to have to watch them while enjoying their favorite streaming services. Here, the commercials are the bad guy. They are the things you need to look out for, and they will harm you both by instructing you to do something bad to yourself or others and eventually simply doing harm by watching them.

Making the commercials into the threat of the film is simply genius to me and while those who like a more straight-forward story may be put off by this type of story by increments. I don’t mind a movie that makes me think and dig a little through the minutiae to understand the real threat. BUFFET INFINITY is that type of movie.

I can see BUFFET INFINITY becoming a cult classic. One of those films that can be studied in the way it reflects media manipulation in modern society and how it very well could be the end of us. This concept will go over some people’s heads, but this is a thinking man’s horror film. While there are hardly any jump scares or over the top gore, this film terrified me more than most in how it slowly communicates an overwhelming sense of dread—so much so that I had to unplug from everything electronic for a bit after watching it. Not too long, I couldn’t survive without my screens, but still, it made me think at how much these screens we stare at all day affect your lives in significant and horrifying ways. You’ll never look at commercials the same way again after watching BUFFET INFINITY. Highly recommended.