Some movies make you want to grab a snack, and then there’s Feed, a movie that makes you want to join a monastery, take a vow of silence, and never look at a calorie again. Directed by Brett Leonard (the man who gave us The Lawnmower Man and Hideaway), this is a nasty, slick and deeply nihilistic movie.

Jerome (Patrick Thompson) is an Interpol cybercrime investigator who is already mentally fraying after a case in Germany involving consensual cannibalism. If you think that’s just a throwaway backstory, you don’t know this movie. Jerome is a mess; his sex life is a violent disaster, and his girlfriend leaves him with the word pig scrawled on his chest in lipstick. He’s the perfect candidate to fall down the darkest rabbit hole on the World Wide Web.

That hole leads to Michael Carter (Alex O’Loughlin, long before he was the face of Hawaii Five-O), a sadistic feeder operating out of a destroyed house in Toledo, Ohio. Michael isn’t just feeding women for a fetish; he’s running a high-stakes gambling site where creeps bet on when his victims, like the captive, ballooning Deirdre, will finally kick the bucket based on their blood pressure and BMI. It’s the ultimate commodification of the human body, served with a side of weight-gain slurry.

O’Loughlin is terrifyingly charismatic here. He plays Michael with a cold, clinical detachment that makes his mommy issues (which involve a dead, immobile mother and some light matricide) feel genuinely dangerous rather than just a trope. Between the decaying remains of Lucy and tube-feeding Deirdre a mixture that includes carved human fat, your stomach will be doing somersaults.

This is the kind of Extreme Cinema that actually has something on its mind besides just grossing you out. It’s a pitch-black satire of the internet’s ability to turn any tragedy into a spectator sport.

But Jerome doesn’t save the day and return to normalcy. Instead, he replaces Michael. The movie ends with Jerome living in suburban bliss, driving out to that same cottage to eat sandwiches in front of a starving, emaciated, wheelchair-bound Michael. The lawman didn’t break the cycle; he just took over the lease.

Extras include commentary by Brett Leonard; deleted scenes; an alternate ending; interviews with Leonard, Alex O’Loughlin, Jack Thompson and producer Melissa Beauford; behind-the-scenes; an infomercial; a photo gallery; and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.