Director Simon Glassman parodies Scientology, religious apocalypses and feuding small town businesses in a subtext driven horror comedy told entirely through bizarre local TV ads in a small Canadian town.
BUFFET INFINITY (2026)
★★★ & 1/2 ★ OF ★★★★★ stars
I’m a big fan of absurdist comedy. I love stuff like The Eric Andre show, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job and pretty much everything Nathan Fielder has done. It’s just something about presenting an absurd scenario at face value and running with it to it’s most bizarre and hilarious conclusion and imagining where it will go next. Simon Glassman’s BUFFET INFINITY has that quality in spades. Buffet Infinity is hilarious, jaw dropping and head smackingly great with a premise that hooks you fron the get go. You as the viewer are watching low budget, public access style commercials from Westride County, a small town in Canada. This is a town where a small town sandwich shop ina strip mall hooks in regulars 7 days a week with a special Italian sauce on their sandwiches that makes customer’s love the owner Jennifer (Allison Bench) and say ‘She’s got the sauce.’ But at around the same time as a mysterious sinkhole arises in the parking lot of the strip mall her sandwich shop is located, so too does a competitive restaurant, Buffet Infinity, whuch offers everything from pizza, salads, Indian food and eventually sandwiches with a suspiciously similar special sauce to the local sandwich shop Jennifer runs. As business woes tied to the weather and sinkholes start to take out nearby businesses between the buffet and the sandwich shop, Buffet Inifinity grows bigger as it swallows those retail locations inching ever closer to swallowing up Jennifer’s business. Along the way, we also hear of a local sci-fi author L.D. Hershey and his foot-fetish friendly self help system / religion called Crypto-Numerology and how its causing a schism in town between business owners and locals, especailly as locals begin disappearing en masse. Could this all be tied together? Is the Buffet a hellmouth to another dimension? Or is this all random madness in a small Canadian community.
In all seriousness, I really enjoyed this low budget horror comedy. Glassman does a great job of establishing the narrative underpinning the film through these commercials and keeps the format enagging throughout the runtime. The style of the commercials could be seen as akin to something from Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks, to Weird Al’s UHF, with a dash of “Interdimensional Cable” from Rick and Morty if you need a primer on what to expect. The commercials themselves are all individually funny, some channeling skits like the TacoTown SNL commercial from years back featuring Jason Sudeikis. That’s part of the reason the film is a lot of fun, because on their own the ads are funny and unique and the storyline is all in the subtext. The characters, from Ahmed the pawn shop owner and his co-horts deadpan rapping, to Jennifer’s shift in advertising as the Buffet starts to really hurt her business, really make the movie great, similar to a mockumentary at times.
Make your way to the line for Buffet Infinity when it hits theaters, I want a second helping already.