Starring: Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald and Donovan Workun
Directed by: Simon Glassman
Rated: Unrated
Running Time: 99 minutes
Yellow Veil Pictures

Our Score: 3.5 out of 5 Stars

Having worked in local news, I’ve always appreciated the “can-do” spirit of local advertisers. Whether it’s pure DIY ingenuity by a tiny agency doing its best, or the awkward business owner subbing in for a slick national spot, there’s a charm to it. Enter “Buffet Infinity,” a VHS-style collage of local news, ads, and a story that feels easy to explain, yet strangely hard to fully convey.

As the film begins, we’re introduced to this unnamed town through a string of commercials. A pawn shop where the owners seem to enjoy filming more than selling, an insurance company with one of the dimmest spokespersons imaginable, a sandwich shop hyping its homemade sauce, and then there’s Buffet Infinity. At first glance, it’s just a buffet with a few items and low prices. Nothing suspicious…except for a monotone voiceover that feels more like bored improvisation than bored script reading.

But things begin to spiral as local news teasers and segments weave into the mix. It becomes clear that Buffet Infinity is more than a flashy new business. It’s an all-consuming presence that may be tied to strange disappearances, biblical shifts in nature, and possibly even a cult.

“Buffet Infinity” feels reminiscent of Panic Fest’s “VHYes,” but where that film leaned into a straightforward ghost story within the VHS chaos, this one uses sketch comedy to build something more layered. Absurdity reigns supreme as Buffet Infinity evolves from mundane burgers and salads to offering global cuisine and a sandwich that rivals the Tower of Babel. But underneath the jokes is a sharp critique of corporate expansion.

What makes the film work is how it forces you to piece together its story through seemingly trivial segments. Even the dull lawyer’s commercial plays a role. Slowly, the horror reveals itself: a force that enters a community, consumes it, overwhelms local competition, and then pretends it’s always belonged. Growing up, that force might have been Walmart. Today, it could be data centers, taxpayer-funded entertainment districts, or the endless spread of Amazon warehouses.

“Buffet Infinity” is an indie, anti-consumerist comedy that feels as old as Reaganomics but as current as Silicon Valley branding. It uses retro aesthetics for laughs while delivering a story about very real, very modern anxieties. Not every segment lands, and it can take a bit to find its rhythm, but its originality carries it. And when it hits, especially with the Buffet Infinity ads themselves, it’s an absolute riot.

Samuel Monroe Jr., known for ‘90s cult classic films “Menace II Society” and “Tales from the Hood,” is fighting for his life after doctors misdiagnosed a meningitis infection.

Monroe’s wife, Shawna Stewart, confirmed the news with Complex, telling the outlet that the star contracted meningitis 18 months ago while filming in Las Vegas.

“He went to several different hospitals, where his condition was repeatedly misdiagnosed and because of this negligence, the meningitis went untreated for eight months,” Stewart told the outlet.

She said that by the time doctors properly diagnosed the actor, the infection had already spread “not only to his spine but also to his brain.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, meningitis is an infection and swelling of the fluid and membranes around the brain and spinal cord. The inflammation from meningitis typically triggers symptoms such as headache, fever and a stiff neck. While viral infections are the most common cause in the United States, bacteria, parasites and fungi can also cause the condition.

The family launched a GoFundMe on Monday, sharing that the financial strain has been “immense” and that over the last nine months, Monroe has been in multiple hospitals and two rehabilitation centers. According to the fundraiser, the actor will require around-the-clock care if he regains consciousness and is removed from life support.

“As the whole family and friends do not want to think negative in the event that Samuel is taken home by God,” Tayonna Stewart wrote on the GoFundMe. “Any funds raise would be put towards a proper and respectful celebration of life for his family, friends and fans to attend.”

The actor’s mom, Joyce Patton, also shared the news on Facebook and asked for prayers for her son.

“Please pray for Samuel Monroe Jr. my son who is now on life support,” she wrote on Saturday. “God don’t make no mistakes but he is gracious and I am humbly asking for his mercy and grace for Sam. I love you son … to the moon and back 100 times.”

At present, the GoFundMe has raised 7% of its $50,000 goal, with “Big Boy’s Neighborhood” radio host Kurt Alexander contributing $1,000.

Monroe, who has gone by the stage name “Caffeine” and “Caffamilliano,” landed his first acting gig in 1993, opposite Patti LaBelle on the hit TV series “Out All Night.” The same year, he splashed onto the big screen, portraying Ilena’s cousin in “Menace II Society.”

He’s also acted in films “Tales from the Hood,” “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood,” “What Goes Around Comes Around,” “Set It Off” and “The Players Club.”

Most recently, he acted in 2023 films “Packz” and “Payment Received.”

Like all great films, Renny Harlin’s solidly enjoyable “Deep Water” is about an airplane that crashes right into a big pile of sharks. And let me tell you, those sharks are fucking hungry.

You’d think the sound of a 747 (or whatever) splitting open above their favorite dinner spot might scare these makos away, but these credible-enough CGI predators quite literally smell blood in the water, and the wreckage is still flaming when they start chomping on the survivors like god’s perfect jump-scares. Even the tiger sharks that ate so many of Quint’s compatriots from the USS Indianapolis in “Jaws” had the courtesy to wait 30 minutes; in this economy, I guess no one can pass up the chance for a free meal, especially when the food is a little richer than usual.

Perhaps that explains why Harlin was lured back into the water after all these years. He’s largely been slumming it since last venturing into the ocean with 1999’s “Deep Blue Sea” (which continues to rival “Jaws” for cinema’s most indelible shark-related deaths, and tragically remains the only movie ever made to end with LL Cool J rapping about how his hat is like a shark’s fin). It certainly explains why Harlin’s “Deep Water” — which is not to be confused with “Deep Water” where Ben Affleck fixates on his snail collection while Ana de Armas cucks him to oblivion — feels so much closer to a real movie than any of the Redbox junk and “The Strangers” sequels that Harlin has been churning out this century. In a word: money. In three more confusing words: Gene Simmons’ money. 

Indeed, the Kiss frontman — aka Chaim Witz, aka “The Demon” — has invested in a well-funded production company along with Arclight Films chairman Gary Hamilton, and their first order of business was to resurrect the “Bait 3D” sequel that was originally set to shoot in 2014 before it was scrapped because of its “uncomfortable similarities” to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Good news: The only “uncomfortable similarities” that remain in “Deep Water” are the ones it shares with the B-pictures of yesteryear (e.g., patience, emotionality, people dying from horniness), which strike a nerve because they’re so rare to find in the age of straight-to-streaming disaster slop like “Thrash.” 

Most of the film’s other resemblances, of which there are many, prove less distressing. For example: The ensemble script, credited to Shayne Armstrong, Pete Bridges, S.P. Krause, and Damien Power, feels less indebted to “The Towering Inferno” than it does to the human simulacra of Garry Marshall’s overstuffed holiday trilogy, but I have to admit I found some charm in how ruthlessly “Deep Water” deploys its archetypes. 

That starts with Aaron Eckhart’s Ben, who’s the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist. A hard-jawed first officer who grimaces even when he’s trying to reassure a frazzled child before takeoff, Ben signs up for a flight to China just because it will keep him away from his wife and kids; the guy is so obviously haunted by something that you half expect him to start radioing the flight control tower about his ghosts. That makes him a perfect foil for the fun-loving captain Rich (Ben Kingsley, loose but still imperious), an errant father and repeat divorcé whose itinerant lifestyle suits his preference for singing bad karaoke to a gaggle of flight attendants over staying in one place with a single woman. 

The other characters make these guys seem complicated by comparison. Three cheers for “Mad Max: Fury Road” actor Angus Sampson, who scores above-the-billing credit for his performance as Dan, the single worst person ever born onto this earth. A rumpled and sweaty human stinkrag, Dan’s entire job in life is to be so utterly loathsome that otherwise good people might shrug their shoulders when he’s devoured by a shark right in front of their faces, and business is a-booming. He moves through “Deep Water” with all the grace of a turd floating through a community swimming pool, harassing Northeastern Airlines employees for a cocktail even after the plane has plunged into the ocean. 

Naturally, it’s only because Dan lies about having a lithium bag in his suitcase that the plane goes down in the first place, a catastrophe that Harlin stretches into a strong, phobia-triggering setpiece that’s even scarier for its step-by-step clarity than for all of the bodily harm it visits upon the passengers. Yes, people still get ripped out of a hole in the fuselage like always, but not until after they’ve been obliterated by flying snack carts and diced apart by shards of broken glass. 

While the crash might lack the dark comic glee that Sam Raimi brought to a similar accident in the recent “Send Help,” Harlin is very selective about his approach to “fun” in this film — while “Deep Water” is always dumb as hell, it’s also heavy with the sort of unleaded sentiment that’s seldom found in pre-summer popcorn fare. Braindead but heartfelt, this is hardly the only disaster movie that wants you to delight in some deaths and get choked up over others, but even the “deserved” kills in this one are tinged with tragedy (spoiler alert: Dan has three kids!), while the tragic ones are sad enough to suggest that “Deep Water” takes itself more seriously than most audiences will. 

That approach can be hard to square with a movie whose characters all seem a few AI tokens short of passing the Turing test. Kelly Gale and Ryan Bown play a pair of comically hot newlyweds who — in a move equal parts insane and understandable — decide to join the mile-high club even though they’re flying with their two young children from previous marriages (both of whom become integral to the story in their own ways). Meanwhile, there’s Kate Fitzpatrick as a sassy and spiteful version of the old woman who wants to show you pictures of their grandkids the whole flight; Li Wenhan and Zhao Simei as star-crossed gamers on the same e-sports team; and Lakota Johnson as a comically aggro American meathead who still wants to pick fights with his fellow passengers on a piece of sinking fuselage surrounded by dorsal fins. There’s also a handful of beautiful flight attendants who all kind of bleed together and/or out.

It’s impossible to care about any of these people in the traditional sense, or to even think of them as people in the traditional sense, but Harlin invests in them with a conviction that proves endearing, if not quite contagious. Plotted like modern schlock but paced almost like a classic ’70s disaster movie, “Deep Water” mines real investment from its thrills by focusing on the little things that movies this stupid usually forget: The respectful friction between Ben and Rich as they figure out how to ditch the plane, the geography between the various pieces of the cabin after it shatters, the way the sharks circle around their victims the way they used to in old cartoons. 

It all feels very purposeful, which makes it that much worse that the kills are telegraphed the same way anytime (I’d expect more from the man who gave us Samuel L. Jackson’s most iconic screen death), and that the movie kinda just bobs in the ocean as it builds to its not-so-grand finale. Admirable as it is that “Deep Water” tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act. Ben Kingsley could have rapped for us at the very least. But if this isn’t quite the best shark movie since “Deep Blue Sea” (that honor still belongs to “The Shallows,” or maybe “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” if you stretch the rules a little), it’s a lot higher up the food chain than it should be. 

Grade: C+

Magenta Light Studios will release “Deep Water” in theaters on Friday, May 1.

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