Laced with a deep vein of dark humour and a brilliantly ironic use of hit pop songs, FEED is guaranteed to disturb and entertain in equal measure.

Phillip Jackson ( Patrick Thompson ) a man who seemingly has it all - a successful police career, a comfortable apartment and a beautiful, devoted girlfriend ( Rose Ashton) but Phillip is about to lose everything he holds dear - perhaps even his mind. Somewhere, a psychotic serial killer is feeding women to death and broadcasting the full horror of their deaths on the internet.

Phillips investigation leads him into a gruesome and unimaginably perverse world where the lines between victim and killer are blurred...

If you're feeling like serial killers and torture films have been done to death, maybe you're part of the target audience for Feed, a one-of-a-kind psychological thriller with one of the more revolting premises to come down the genre pike in recent years.

Australian Interpol investigator Philip Jackson (played by burly, tough-looking actor Patrick Thompson) seeks out illegal criminal activities on the Internet, and stumbles upon the mortifying spectacle of a website devoted to the fetish of stuffing food down the throats of consenting women as they gain weight, willingly expanding until they're over 600 pounds. After enduring the image of FeederX.com site owner Michael Carter (Alex O'Loughlin) gleefully tracking and detailing his latest victim's vital signs and measurements, Jackson suspects that Carter may be literally feeding his partners to death.

That premise alone will determine whether viewers have the stomach (no pun intended) for this sort of thing; TLA Video releases the movie to DVD on its Danger After Dark line July 18, following a New York City big-screen premiere at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater on July 10 and a date at Montreal's Fantasia film festival the same month. But director Brett Leonard is counting on viewers to look past the story's grotesque nature into its more resonant themes: body image, adult consent and cultural stigmas. Leonard's previous genre films, such as The Lawnmower Man, Hideaway and Virtuosity, were mainstream in comparison, but those who saw his highly compromised comic-book adaptation Man-Thing may be happy that he's navigating his career in a bold new direction.

"I directed Man-Thing in Australia for Marvel Comics," Leonard explains, "and you should know that if you're making movies for Marvel, it's their film. I'm very pleased with the visual style, but not too pleased with the script. That was something I had no control over, and that's the way it goes. The review of feed on the FANGORIA website said I'd redeemed myself for Man-Thing, and in a way I agree." It's rare to hear such candor from a director who hopes to navigate a career between high-concept studio pictures and low-budget independents.

"Man-Thing was an interesting situation, though," Leonard says, putting a positive spin on a troublesome circumstance. "I had a great time working with my director of photography Steve Arnold—he was referred to me by Lord of the Rings director of photography Andrew Lesnie when I asked, 'Andrew, who is the next you?' I also enjoyed my cast, and after Man-Thing I was hoping to make something with the same team, but where I had more control. I wanted to raise the funds quickly, keep it low-budget and not have to spend years in development hell."

Thompson and O'Loughlin, two of Man-Thing's supporting actors, approached Leonard on the set of that film with a rather audacious pitch. "They had seen the whole feeder/gainer concept on television and all over the Internet, and thought it might make a compelling psychological thriller," the director recalls. "This immediately got me thinking that we'd be able to do an intelligent genre film with some ideas in it. Postmodern horror films like Saw and Hostel are visceral, gritty and successful, but I wondered if there was another way to make a film disturbing without hacking people's limbs off. I wanted to push other buttons in my audience."

The question that has to come up for viewers is why it's more profoundly disturbing to see a filled-to-capacity, ready-to-burst fat woman in the middle of every frame than witnessing violent torture in retro-grindhouse movies. "It's worth thinking about," Leonard says, "and this idea of making a Super Size Me meets Seven has allowed me to give a primal scream about things I've witnessed in Western consumer culture. In a way, this film is about America, because we've reached a kind of nadir where consumption is posited as evolution, while at the same time anorexia and heroin chic is seen as the best and beautiful."

Since Leonard has been living in Australia, it has allowed him a certain objective distance. "It was interesting to use Australian locations doubling as my hometown of Dayton, Ohio [where the Michael Carter character lurks in suburbia], which gave the scenes a strange kind of Lynchian creepiness. That makes it not quite America. It's a little skewed—but so is our perception. We have such a psychotic obsession with body image, so if a popular actress has a baby, the fact that she has gained some weight is good for five People magazine covers. That's insane, you know?"

In contrast to the feeder/gainer is the investigator, Jackson, but Leonard doesn't portray him as a white knight. He's in a polygamist relationship with his skinny little girlfriend, and their relationship is based on rough sex, too much booze and hostile verbal abuse. "I didn't want there to be any clear heroes in this movie, because I don't believe heroes exist in 2006," says Leonard. "The detective is probably more disturbing than Michael Carter. When I've screened the film, women in the audience empathize more with Michael. I've asked them if they realize what he's doing to his victims, but they respond, 'He has his reasons, she loves him and they're both consenting adults.'"

That said, Leonard found his research for the film quite intense and unnerving. "Google 'feeder/ gainers' and you'll find many sites dedicated to it," he notes. "But we also get into the taboo of cannibalism, which is more popular than you'd imagine," The opening fright sequence involves Jackson barging in on a German cannibal slicing up his still-alive victim in the shower. "The whole feeder/gainer concept is really extreme," Leonard says, "but when you start reading poetry about 'eating the long pig,' which is human flesh, it is probably the most disturbing thing I've ever come across."

Leonard, who has done enough interviews by now to get through a discussion on the topic without wincing in repulsion, continues, "There are so many cannibalism sites out there, with 400 registered cannibals in Germany alone. They speak in code, which is creepy beyond belief. Frankly, I wish I could un-see some of the material out there. That first scene is actually based on the infamous case that happened in Germany. We staged it just like the actual case video, where the cannibal has his victim in the bathtub and the penis in the pan. He actually fried fillets that were cut off the thigh. But his victim did express, 'I want to be eaten. This is what I want.' We directly quoted that."

Viewers may wonder if there are actual Internet cops out there cracking down on these sites, and some reviews have erroneously criticized Feed for saying such detectives aren't real, or that they wouldn't be doing their jobs in quite this way. "We did our homework, met the investigators, interviewed them and learned how they would break up international pedophile rings and other criminal activities," Leonard reveals. "The jargon in the film is real. Philip and his partner Nigel are based on actual people who troll the Internet looking for extreme stuff. They do it in very specific ways, during certain hours of the day, and they're making psychological profiles all the time."

One of Feed's more challenging roles is that of the gainer, Deidre, who is often seen naked in her bedroom, eating vast quantities of junk food. She's not played as a joke, and actress Gabby Millgate handles the role with remarkable subtlety. "She is a tremendous actress, and is pretty famous in Australia for playing Muriel's sister in Muriel's Wedding. She's mostly known as a comedienne, and has her own one-woman show. Gabby is a big girl, and has been that way her whole life, but nowhere near as big as the character she plays in Feed." The actress wore a prosthetic fat suit, which is wholly convincing as the real deal.

"I had to do gestalt therapy with her to do what we needed to do," Leonard explains. "She knew it was an amazing role, she truly understood it and wanted to do it, but sometimes she'd be traumatized by what was going on and would say, 1 can't.' I would help her through those times, because she was able to convey all of the different aspects of Deidre very strongly. This is a very visual role, and some might refer to it as 'image crime' because it's perceived as offensive. But Gabby has a beautiful face and great eyes, and gives a courageous performance."

The director admits, however, that when it comes to watching a 600-pound woman being force-fed on screen, "I find it disturbing and disgusting like others do, because I've grown up with the exact same cultural stigmas you have. I've never had a partner who was big like that. But I can relate in some ways. I'm actually quite a big man myself. I've battled weight my whole life, and even though I've never been morbidly obese, I see a strong psychological pain associated with one's body. Deidre represents that for me, and I feel like she's the only human character in the whole movie."

Although the film is all about creating disturbances for the audience, the experience of making it was a pure joy. "I went back to my roots of guerrilla filmmaking, and have to say it was a complete antidote to Man-Thing," says Leonard, who debuted with the zombie flick The Dead Pit in 1988. "Feed was a tight little film. We made it very quickly, with a 15-person crew. Most of them were new to film, and the only experienced people were my DP Steve Arnold, my assistant director, myself and some of the cast. Our star, Patrick Thompson, would even sometimes help the crew as a grip. It was a family vibe, and some scenes such as Deidre's pink room were shot in my house."

The screenplay is credited to Kieran Galvin, whom Leonard considers a very talented writer/director in his own right, but the story came about largely as a group effort. The two lead actors and Leonard outlined the treatment with dialogue, and then Galvin brought them across the finish line. "There's a lot more to this than the single writing credit signifies," Leonard notes. "It was all a freeing experience, and we were totally into it. We lived the universe of this movie."

That meant the actors knew how much they were going to physically and psychologically expose themselves. Nearly every lead character has a sex scene or nude scene that commits some transgression, and the performers were fearlessly willing to go there. "To Alex O'Loughlin's credit, he really got into playing the feeder," Leonard says. "When I asked him to go into a scene naked, masturbating while feeding hamburgers to this large woman, he said, 'Absolutely, yes.' He knew that was what a feeder would do. It's all part of the ritual, as is the force-feeding of liquid fat. None of what we do is over the top compared to what really goes on out there."

The film's climax is a confrontation between the detective, the feeder and the gainer, with physical brutality matched by psychological devastation. By the end, the characters are threatened not only by guns and violence, but also by the creepy ideas their situation poses. On the set, the charged performances created a sense of electricity in the air. "It was just myself with a digital camera and the three actors in the room," Leonard says. "The drama was palpable. It was one of those moments as a director where you say, 'I've created a vibe, and everyone is in it.' I was reminded of moments like the dinner scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where a level of trauma is conveyed without extreme violence. I wanted to match that kind of raw intensity."

Like many directors of low-budget movies, Leonard took advantage of the cheapness of video, allowing him plenty of room to explore the visual possibilities. "Feed was my first time using hi-def, and we wanted to push it as far as we could," he says. "Steve Arnold and I went for a garish, extreme color scheme, since this story is a kind of Internet real-time nightmare. It also allowed us to shoot an incredible amount of footage. With Feed, we shot over 100 hours of tape, which is impossible on a low-budget 35mm film. In that final scene, for instance, we wanted to be able to do an incredible amount of coverage for very rapid cutting in the editing room, and had to do that with very little time or money. Video made that possible. It was a good learning experience, and interesting for us to tailor the look to our subject matter."

Leonard's latest project, currently in the final stages of postproduction, was also lensed on video, but Highlander: The Source is as radically different from Feed as you can get. Shooting on the Viper camera, which Michael Mann used on the Tom Cruise-Jamie Foxx thriller Collateral, allowed Leonard to go for a more epic, romantic visual stylization. The director sounds happy to be moving in another direction as he chuckles, "Now we're back to nice, clean storytelling, as in cleanly slicing off people's heads."

The Highlander series has been all over the place in terms of style and content, with an increasingly dismal spate of sequels. "I made Highlander: The Source purely for one reason: I am a fan of the first film," Leonard says. "There was a chance to revitalize the franchise, and I saw it as an opportunity to put my stamp on a mythology that has been around for 20 years. There aren't many of those around. The fan base is very strong, and like many of them, I wasn't a fan of the sequels. We tried to hark back to the visual largesse of the original. Even though this film emerges from the TV series with some of the same characters and actors, like Adrien Paul, Peter Wingfield as Methos and Jim Byrnes as Joe Dawson the Watcher, we wanted to create a dark movie on a grand scale."

Hopefully, Leonard can bring a fresh slant to the series; he has certainly made his distinct mark on horror with Feed. "I haven't seen another movie like ours, and am trying to make films that are unique," he says. "I plan to continue mainstream Hollywood pictures as part of my career path, but also want to develop films that are more personal expressions in storytelling. I've had people respond on all ends of the spectrum to Feed, but that's what I hoped for. This is a movie that is obviously not for everyone, but for people who are into extreme cinema, I believe they'll find something interesting in it."