Buffet Infinity

There is a subgenre of found-footage and collage filmmaking that tends to thrive at the fringes of festival circuits and midnight screening rooms, built on the premise that existing commercial media — the kind designed to be forgotten thirty seconds after broadcast — contains something genuinely unsettling when reassembled by the right set of hands. Buffet Infinity, directed by Glassman and scheduled for release on April 24, 2026, appears to be working squarely within that tradition.

The film is constructed from hundreds of hours of original, low-budget television commercials, edited together to tell what is described as a sinister story about two restaurants locked in competition in a place called Westridge County. The genres attached to the project are comedy and horror — a pairing that, in the context of the source material, feels less like a contradiction than a logical outcome. Local television advertising has always occupied an odd emotional register: performative cheerfulness, slightly off-kilter production values, an uncanny insistence on friendliness that, viewed out of context or in sufficient quantity, tips easily into dread. Glassman's apparent conceit is to take that latent strangeness seriously.

The classification of these commercials as "original" is worth dwelling on. This is not an archival project, not a collection of actual broadcast ephemera from some real mid-century American television market. The advertisements were made for this film, which means Glassman and whatever collaborators are involved constructed an entire fictional commercial ecosystem — jingles, spokespersons, price promotions, seasonal specials, the whole vocabulary of local restaurant advertising — and then treated that constructed archive as raw material. The creative labor involved in that process is considerable and somewhat unusual. Before a single frame of narrative film was assembled, someone had to produce what amounts to a large catalog of deliberately cheap-looking promotional content, each piece presumably calibrated to feel plausible as the kind of ad that might run at two in the morning between an infomercial and a news update. That foundational work sets Buffet Infinity apart from films that simply mine existing cultural detritus; the detritus here is handmade.

The setting of Westridge County is notable for being entirely fictional — a generic-sounding American locality of the type that local television commercials implicitly conjure whenever they reference "the community" or "our neighbors." The rivalry between two restaurants, framed as sinister, suggests the film is interested in the way commercial competition gets narrated as civic identity, the way a buffet or a family dining establishment presents itself not merely as a place to eat but as a kind of anchor of local belonging. Horror and comedy both have long traditions of exploiting exactly that kind of earnestness, the places where sincere civic performance becomes grotesque precisely because of its sincerity.

What remains opaque, given the information available, is almost everything about the film's actual structure and execution. It is unclear whether Buffet Infinity follows any characters across the commercials, whether there are actors who recur across the fake ad archive in the manner of a long-running local campaign, or whether the narrative emerges more abstractly from patterns in the advertising itself — pricing wars, competing slogans, the visual language of one restaurant gradually encroaching on the other's identity. The horror element, in particular, raises questions the available material does not answer. Whether the film tends toward overt supernatural content, psychological unease, or something more sociological in its framing of dread is unknown. The comedy register is similarly undefined: the humor might come from affectionate parody of the low-budget ad form, from escalating absurdism, or from the kind of flat deadpan that emerges when horror and comedy are treated as genuinely interchangeable.

Glassman's broader body of work is not detailed in the available information, which makes it difficult to place Buffet Infinity within a directorial career or to identify recurring preoccupations. What can be said is that the approach described — building a feature from a constructed archive of fake commercials — is not a common one, and the logistical commitment required suggests a project that has been in development for some time, or one produced within a particular kind of low-budget independent infrastructure that permits extended and unconventional production processes.

The film's popularity score, as of the available data, is quite low, which is consistent with a project of this type at this stage. Found-footage and collage films with horror-comedy registers tend to build their audiences through word of mouth and festival exposure rather than broad advance awareness. They also tend to attract a specific kind of viewer: people with a tolerance for formal experimentation, an interest in the horror potential of ordinary commercial culture, and some affection for the specific aesthetic register of public-access and local-broadcast television. The fictional town of Westridge County, with its two warring buffet restaurants and its invented commercial history, is an invitation to spend approximately feature-film length inside a place that never existed, watching advertisements for food that was never served.

That proposition will not be for everyone, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. For the viewer who finds something genuinely strange in the gap between the cheerfulness of a local restaurant ad and the world it is trying to conjure, Buffet Infinity may be precisely the kind of film that rewards attention.