Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | August 4, 2025
If you’re feeling adventurous—and what have any of us got to lose, what with yonder global collapse and whatnot—then you’ll definitely want to seek out and hit up writer-director Simon Glassman’s first feature Buffet Infinity when it ambles your way (it just premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal). This is some adventurous cinematic nonsense of the highest and finest order—if you’re a fan of anything Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s brains have secreted or the Comedy Central psychosis curios Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It from Alan Resnick and Ben O’Brien, then Buffet Infinity’s got your number. (Especially if your number is… wait for it… keep waiting… infinity.)
Telling its outlandish tale entirely via a series of escalating local late-night commercials for the car dealerships, sandwich shops, law firms, and pawn shops of the fictional Westridge County (which it feels somehow important to point out is also the name of the area where Murder, She Wrote was set), Buffet Infinity takes its time in revealing any kind of narrative out from its seeming chaos. (It’s no surprise this began as a YouTube short and expanded from there.) It’s only in the repetition where you’re able to start sussing out where things have begun in this sleepy hamlet and where things might be going, and for what at first feels random to begin taking form. Great and terrible Lovecraftian form, wha ah ah!!!
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As far as you can split this beautiful beast into “acts”, Buffet Infinity’s first-ish one introduces us to Westridge County’s small cadre of local business people via their charmingly lo-fi advertisements as some unseen presence (presumably us, the viewer) channel-surfs through them. There’s Ahmed, the local pawn shop owner who, with his side-kick slacker employee, performs little raps and dance routines about his mega-low prices. There’s the local lawyer Mosley Rosen, hilariously stilted in the way of all T.V. commercial lawyers, who sometimes (but not always) wears a matted wig. There’s the discount mattress store lady who is existentially torn between the choice of firm versus soft. And there are flashes of local news broadcasts with their cheery interchangeable news-mannequins regaling us with family-friendly stories about adorable puppies going on their own little misadventures.
Most importantly there’s Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, a beloved community eatery that’s run by the one and only Jenny (Allison Bench) herself. Jenny’s special sandwich sauce recipe is a family secret that’s been passed down for generations, and she’s not afraid to flaunt it. Her commercials are the highest quality of the local bunch, all smiling customers taking great big slo-mo bites, letting us know up front that Jenny’s Sandwich Shop clearly means serious business.
Until Buffet Infinity arrives in town, anyway. Moving into the opposite end of the Crossroads Shopping Complex from Jenny’s, the chain restaurant that gives our film its title begins infiltrating the airwaves with its own army of even pricier advertisements that promise a boundless sea of eats for next to nothing prices. Why their deals are so ridiculous they almost seem literally impossible! The math doesn’t add up! But everybody looks so happy piling up their plates with fajitas and fried chicken, who cares?
Surely it’s just a weird coincidence that a massive sinkhole opens up in the parking lot right around the same time that Buffet Infinity has its Grand Opening. Or that a strange noise begins emanating out of it. Or that local townspeople begin going missing. Right?
Things only grow weirder from there as an all-out passive-aggressive advertising battle between Jenny’s and Buffet Infinity sets the town’s airwaves aflame, with the two businesses insinuating all sorts of sordid accusations just beneath the surface of their cheerful messaging. And we haven’t even gotten into the constant interruptions of infomercials for the religious scholar slash recording artist Langdon P. Hershey, whose coded messages, cult-like ramblings, and foot fetishry begin worming their way into every corner of this once quiet little community as well.
Soon enough Buffet Infinity is living up to its name, swallowing up one business in the strip mall after another. Inching ever closer to Jenny’s shop, while forming neighborhood alliances with other companies in town, the Buffet even begins showcasing their own rather familiar looking special sauce…
Needless to say this is all very silly. And Buffet Infinity will wring a lot of laughs out of those willing to stick through its sometimes assaultive nature and structure. At an hour and fifty minutes, the movie certainly sometimes makes you feel like a customer who’s bitten off more than any human person could possibly chew. But if it’s a trade-off between a movie stretching itself out past sanity in order to really make us feel like we’ve lost our damn minds by the absolute WTF-ery of its galaxy-brained conclusion, then I’ll happily submit myself to the former to achieve the latter.
And beyond its formal inventiveness and goofball stoner theatrics Glassman’s film does have very real issues on its mind, right under the static. Anyone who’s mourned the collapse of locally-owned “mom and pop shops” (man how inept politicians love to fetishize that phrase) will vibe with Buffet Infinity’s barely-concealed metaphors about “fake news” and rampant consumerism and the spoiled spoils of late-stage capitalism. In its bizarre and singular way this movie is truly some Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Eddington meets Pee-wee’s Playhouse sh**—a Sloppy Joe satire force-fed to us in colorful and hilarious thirty second bursts that make the medicine go down, down, down, until we’re all happily gagging on it. That’s the Buffet Infinity guarantee.
