I absolutely love film makers that do something different… swing for the fence by coloring outside the lines. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, just break the stereotypical Hollywood archetypal, and over used, mold. Well, today I discovered a movie that is so different, so weird, so original as to maybe collapse in under its own weight? Let me try to describe the experience of watching Buffet Infinity, because it’s unlike almost anything else you’ll see this year.
This isn’t a “movie”. Instead, you get a TV set tuned to a dead-end cable channel in some small Alberta town, sometime around 1989, and you never get up from the couch. There are no scenes. No protagonist following a plot. No dialogue moving a story forward. There is only the programming: low-budget local commercials, infomercials, public service announcements, and the occasional news report. We get a procession of ads for a lawyer. A pawn shop jingle. A self-help spot. A buffet grand-opening promo. And you, the channel surfer, slowly piece together, from between the gaps spliced between the ads, that something deeply, cosmically wrong is happening to this community.
That’s the whole film. And against every odd, it works. I heard about the gimmick… I decided I’d give it a full five minutes, and if it didn’t hook me, I was out. And I think I was hooked in two. And I have no idea how it happened. Maybe my brain starting thinking of it like Exit 8? (You know the movie/game wherein you have to spot the changes… the deltas… or you get sent back to the beginning of the game?) And so I was scouring the ads like a true crime detective… I was reading the legal copy at the bottom of the page, I was watching for changes in pricing, I was looking for ANY signs of a narrative arc that I could find. And humorously, the story was progressing everywhere! I just wasn’t exactly certain what was happening entirely.
Regardless, if you started this “film”, and quit, at the end were wondering what the heck just happened, I’m going to do my best to break this film down for you and explain the ins and outs of what this movie was trying to do. So yeah, this is your decoder ring. Let’s break down what’s happening in Westridge County.
Buffet Infinity Spoiler Warning
I’m going to lay out the whole thing — the war, the disappearances, the cult, and what this collective set of ads and promos was ultimately trying tell you. If you’d rather let it wash over you unspoiled (a totally valid way to experience this one), bail now. Otherwise, into the sinkhole we go.
The Setup: A Strip Mall Goes to War
The stage is the Crossroads Shopping Complex, a perfectly ordinary little strip mall. Its tenants are the kind of small businesses every town has: Pet ‘n Play, Brooks Electronics, and the local hero — Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, run by Jennifer Joy Avery, famous for a signature secret sauce passed down from her great grandmother that she crafted in the late 1800’s.
Then a new restaurant opens: Buffet Infinity. All-you-can-eat. Impossibly cheap. Relentlessly cheerful in its advertising. And from the moment it arrives, it is not happy to just simply coexist with the other stores in the complex.
And this launches an advertising war between the shops in the strip mall. And this is the entire engine that fuels the entirety of this “movie”. Buffet Infinity starts undercutting Jenny’s on price, forcing her to slash her own. Jenny runs at $14 a sandwich, then $13, then lower still. Then Buffy Infinity starts mimicking her and her menu. They start rolling out knockoff food items. The gloriously named “Beyond Comprehension Burger” and taking thinly veiled shots at her secret sauce. (They even begin claiming that Jenny isn’t even Italian!) What begins as light competitive ribbing curdles, ad by ad, into something genuinely vicious… it becomes two businesses slinging accusations at each other from behind big friendly smiles and 1-800 numbers. If that were the whole movie, it’d be a sharp little satire of cutthroat franchise capitalism. But that’s not the whole movie.
The Wrongness Creeps In
Right around the time Buffet Infinity holds its grand opening, a massive sinkhole opens up in the shopping complex parking lot. Surely a coincidence. Right? Then a strange low hum starts emanating through the town. It’s an ambient drone nobody can locate or explain. All the shops advertising begin referencing the noise. Then the pets start disappearing. Enough of them that Pet ‘n Play, unable to keep animals safe in its care, is forced to close its doors. And the instant that space goes empty, Buffet Infinity expands into it.
Notice the pattern, because the movie repeats it: a business gets hollowed out by mysterious disappearances, and Buffet Infinity swallows the vacancy. Brooks Electronics falls next. Same playbook. The buffet keeps growing, one storefront at a time, living up to its name. Infinite. Always expanding. Never satisfied with what it has.
Meanwhile the disappearances stop being limited to pets. The news reports — which keep interrupting the ads — begin cataloging a rising number of missing people. The sinkhole keeps widening. The hum gets louder. And the cheerful local programming starts to feel less like a charming time capsule and more like a transmission you’re not supposed to be receiving.
The Cult: Langdon P. Hershey
Threaded through all of this is the film’s strangest recurring figure: Langdon P. Hershey, a self-styled religious scholar who’s also a recording artist with his own albums and cheesy sci-fi novels. Hershey’s infomercials are the film’s spiritual rot made visible. They’re packed with coded messages, apocalyptic warnings, and cult-recruitment energy dressed up as late-night televangelism. He is, functionally, the town prophet, the one figure openly announcing that the end of the world is coming, while everyone else is arguing about sandwich prices. And his eventual dramatic demise is the film’s clearest signal that he was right. The cosmic horror isn’t a metaphor. Something is genuinely coming, and Hershey saw it before anyone.
What Happened to Jenny
As the ad war peaks, a news report drops the bombshell: Jenny is now a missing person. The town’s most beloved small-business owner, the warm human counterweight to Buffet Infinity’s cold anonymity, has disappeared, under murky circumstances.
But the movie doesn’t stop at her disappearance. It goes further, and nastier. A trailer airs for a made-for-TV movie “based on the true story” of Jenny’s disappearance — except it portrays her as an exploitative money launderer with a drug problem and ties to the criminal underworld. A complete character assassination, broadcast to the same audience that loved her sandwiches.
This last detail is pretty important – but it’s pretty easy to miss because it’s buried in this wild, non-movie format. Buffet Infinity didn’t just consume Jenny’s business and (it’s heavily implied) Jenny herself. It then rewrote the story of who she was. The winner doesn’t just take the market. It takes the narrative. It takes the truth. This is shout out to HISTORY. To the winner not only go the spoils, but also the rightness of history.
So What Is Buffet Infinity, Actually?
But what the heck happened in this movie? I don’t get it!!! Ok, let me just clearly and succinctly spell it out for you. The restaurant, the sinkhole, the hum, the disappearances, and the cult are all the same thing. Buffet Infinity isn’t a business that happens to be operating next to a supernatural event. Buffet Infinity is the supernatural event. It’s an infinite, faceless, eldritch consumer — a hungering entity that has manifested itself as a cheap all-you-can-eat buffet precisely because that’s the perfect disguise. What better camouflage for a thing that devours endlessly than a restaurant built around the promise of endless consumption? It eats pets. It eats people. It eats businesses. It eats Jenny. It eats the truth about Jenny. And it keeps expanding into every space it empties, because expansion is the only thing it knows how to do.
The sinkhole is its mouth. The hum is its voice. The cult is its religion. The ads are its lure.
The Real Horror Isn’t the Monster
And now we get to why this movie has stuck with people far longer than a goofy “killer buffet” premise has any right to.
In the back half, something quietly devastating happens in the margins: a group of local small-business owners band together to oppose the town’s politicians, in what looks like a coordinated defense of Buffet Infinity. The same predatory entity that’s been eating their neighbors one storefront at a time — and they’re rallying to protect it.
But are they true believers? Or are they simply terrified of what happens to them and their livelihoods if they don’t fall in line?
That’s the question the whole film has been building toward. And it’s all kinds of unsettling. The eldritch monster in the sinkhole is scary. But the thing Buffet Infinity is really about is the community that chooses to feed it — the small players who, faced with an unstoppable, ever-expanding force, decide their best move is to convert, comply, and look the other way while it swallows everyone around them. Complicity as survival strategy. We’ve all watched a beloved local institution get steamrolled by a faceless chain while the town shrugged and kept shopping there because it was cheaper. This is that, turned cosmic.
(If you’ve spent any time in the analog-horror corner of the internet… say for example, the Backrooms or other creepypasta stories, a lot of this DNA will feel familiar. The faceless infinite entity, the dread leaking through degraded found media, the YouTube-to-feature pipeline. Buffet Infinity is playing in that same sandbox, just with a sense of humor and an Alberta accent.)
A Note on the Ending
I’ll be honest with you about something, because it’s part of what makes this film special: Buffet Infinity doesn’t really have a “climax” in the traditional sense. There’s no final confrontation, no hero who descends into the sinkhole to save the day. There’s no hero at all. The film simply lets the engulfment complete itself — the town gets quieter, the ads get stranger, the imagery gets more nakedly nightmarish (you will, at one point, find yourself staring at a man with an eyeball where his crotch should be, and you will simply have to accept this), and Westridge County is consumed.
That’s the point. Apocalypses don’t always arrive with a bang. Sometimes they arrive as a grand-opening sale.
