Buffet Infinity (Simon Glassman, 2026)

Stay out of places that you shouldn’t be

Here’s an outrageous statement for you: the movie which best encapsulates the current hellscape that is modern America is a silly little Canadian movie that plays like a bunch of stitched-together public access commercials from the early-mid 90s.

Let me explain… Buffet Infinity is a horror comedy that eschews a conventional narrative form in favor of telling its story through an hour and a half of faux local news clips and cheesy ads for local businesses.

And it’s a masterpiece. No, really.

As the film “channel surfs” through commercials for personal injury lawyers, mattress stores, and used car dealerships, the crumbs of the core narrative is established:

A strange sinkhole has appeared behind a local shopping complex, and a mysterious new all-you-can-eat restaurant, Buffet Infinity, has opened nearby.

Buffet Infinity and their main competitor, Jenny’s Sandwich Shop, trade attacks on each other in an ongoing and escalating war of ads. Blows are exchanged between the two, cutting each other down, fostering suspicion of the other, and going to outrageous extremes to outdo their competition in every conceivable way. It’s laugh out loud funny, and yet it’s also extremely unnerving.

And that’s before Jenny disappears. She’s not the first disappearance, either. There have already been a significant number of missing pets and there’s about to be an epidemic of missing people. But Jenny is the first — and the most significant.

Suddenly, it becomes glaringly obvious that something is very wrong concerning Buffet Infinity. Despite the early news reports excited about the new restaurant offering endless meal options, fears rapidly mount regarding the restaurant’s baffling lack of staff and its tumorous growth as it annexes the businesses on its borders and eventually metastasizes across the entire town.

My hot take is that Buffet Infinity is analogous for AI and AI-powering data centers. While it might be argued that the restaurant itself is sentient, there is certainly evidence that its ads demonstrate an artificial intelligence gradually absorbing and replicating what it has learned. Its initial ad is extremely rough around the edges, which a stumbling voice-over which implies the speaker has never actually spoken before. With each subsequent spot, however, the ads improve in quality, they breach the uncanny valley and become increasingly polished and refined.

It’s learning, it’s copying.

This is perhaps most obvious in a tony black and white advert that is a clear mimic of the most recent Jenny’s ad, but which then goes off script to inexplicably spend an inordinate amount of time highlighting the restaurant’s polished brass doorknobs — a rip from an unrelated commercial about cookware that previously played?

(There’s also an omnipresent droning noise that infests the town; it is suggested that its origin is Buffet Infinity — another reason to draw the data center comparison.)

As the movie progresses, things get weirder.

A trailer for a made-for-TV movie airs, purportedly based on the “true story” of Jenny’s disappearance, but portraying her as an exploitative money launderer with a drug addiction and ties to the criminal underworld.

A cadre of small business owners come together to oppose local politicians, seemingly in a coordinated defense of Buffet Infinity. But do they actually support it or are they afraid of what will happen to them and their livelihoods if they don’t? (Though not exactly analogous for recent public versus politicians clashes over data center approvals, its certainly evocative.)

Simultaneously to all of this, there are ominous messages paid for by the suspiciously-named Westbridge Society for Religious Freedom, which turns out to be a Scientology-inspired cult but which might actually be on the side of good as they are the clear leaders of the fight against Buffet Infinity and see it for what it truly is.

By the time the movie reaches its crescendo, there have been exploding heads, levitating masses, and eyeball genitals.

There is so much more that could be said about Buffet Infinity. I’m confident there is so much more to be discovered on rewatches, too. It is an amazing accomplishment; it’s outrageous, ambitious, crazy, hilarious, and utterly freaky movie that is unlike anything you have ever seen before.

Buffet Infinity is ridiculous film and so perfectly of this ridiculous time we’re living in, I’m declaring it the first must-watch movie of the year.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying Buffet Infinity on Amazon here. Thank you :)