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If you've ever found yourself up late at night, mindlessly changing the channels on television, and come across a program that's so completely bizarre and surreal – something impossible to put into words – yet it keeps you sitting there, and leaves you wondering "what did I just see?", then you are bound to enjoy Buffet Infinity.
Director Simon Glassman throws the rules of narrative out the window with a feature-length assortment of parody commercials that tell of the supernatural goings on within an Edmonton neighborhood, all through a public access television network. Namely, we see commercials for a sandwich shop, an ambiguously practicing lawyer, a used car salesman, a religious cult, and a pawn shop, to name a few, all of them connected by the mysterious, strangely sentient, and ever-expanding Buffet Infinity.
Highly influenced by SCTV and equally a feature-length Tim and Eric sketch, Buffet Infinity is perfectly strange, funny, and a fascinating experiment. However, it does run into the issue of being too ambitious. Namely, the high-concept can only sustain itself for a certain period of time, but Buffet Infinity runs at feature length.
While I would admittedly watch hours of these fake commercials, thanks to the narrative being told by Glassman, it would be better suited to 60-70 minutes. The film struggles to ground itself during the ending as it did throughout the rest of the runtime. All of the strange and supernatural things we witness crash together in a way that feels sudden and leaves the audience with far more questions than they had before.
Glassman apparently has hundreds of hours of footage of these commercials, turning the editing process into a five-year endeavor, with countless more clips that were cut from the final project. You can see the labour in the feature; the editing remains the absolute highlight of the filmmaking. Each independent clip comes together to form a complete narrative, and their words cut into one another for some comedic sound gags. To sit back and think about the scale behind Buffet Infinity is truly an impressive feat.
Although Glassman was clear that there would be no follow-up due to the intense labor that was putting it together, the film is such fun that I found it to be continually engaging, even as the concept dragged on. Buffet Infinity is a moment stuck in a dream, one that lives in the forgotten late-night public television networks. It's something that you could have seen before, but the delirium of late-night channel surfing left forgotten. But most of all, it has the best sandwich sauce.
