“Midnight Meat Train” Review

Filed Under Movies

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how Lionsgate had decided to dump “Midnight Meat Train” in dollar theaters. The film did about $30,000 in business the weekend it opened. That said, “The Love Guru” has at the very least outgrossed one movie this summer. But why did Lionsgate doom the movie to box office failure? There’s clearly an audience for it. I know. Last night I saw it in a packed house at the Nuart.

The Nuart had managed to get their hands on a print of “Midnight Meat Train” and gave this film its one and only Los Angeles premiere — appropriately at 12 a.m. I got there about a half-hour before the movie started, and the line had already wrapped itself around the block. With virtually no publicity, the film had sold out. I’d fortunately bought my ticket in advance. The only trick was finding street parking in the same zip code as the movie house.

The director Ryuhei Kitamura and writer Jeff Buhler were in attendance to give brief, butt-hurt rants about how the studio had screwed them over before the film began. We were then all encouraged to boo the Lionsgate logo, like that wasn’t already a given with this crowd.

I enjoyed the film. I’ve seen far, far worse horror flicks — “House of 1,000 Corpses,” “Underworld,” and “House of the Dead” immediately come to mind — that have had wide releases. “Midnight Meat Train” isn’t something I’d pick up on DVD, but it’s a better than average horror movie, based on a short story by Clive Barker. I think it’s about a half-dozen kills shy of being a gorefest and a little convoluted at the end to work as a straight slasher flick. But the audience seemed to be into it, particularly the scene when a guy gets hit on the back of the head with a hammer so hard that his eyes pop out of their sockets.

The film is about a photog named Leon (Bradley Cooper) who’s trying to ingratiate himself with the artistic community. He’s encouraged by an art dealer played by Brooke Shields(!) to dig deeper. So Leon goes from taking pictures of drunks on benches to pretty girls being mugged. When he thinks he can tie the disappearance of a model to a creepy guy (Vinnie Jones) in a three-piece suit with a doctor’s bag on the subway, Leon goes through all the paces of movies like these: he can’t convince the cops of anything, he grows distant from his girlfriend (Leslie Bibb) and he uses my favorite movie cliche of all time, “I know this sounds crazy…”

The plot is just what happens between the scenes of carnage. But for a movie called “Midnight Meat Train,” it’s not overwhelmingly gory. There are some inventive scenes of dismemberment. A woman gets decapitated, and you can see from her point-of-view as her head’s separated from the rest of her body. Granted, they did that in last year’s British slasher “Severance,” another film I saw at the Nuart coincidentally, but I’m not bored by the gag yet. I simply found myself wanting a little more overly-stylized splatter.

I think the supernatural weirdness in the final reel is probably the weakest element of the film. By day, Vinnie Jones’ character works in a slaughterhouse. It’s rather chilling to think that he’s getting rid of his victims by grinding them up with dead animal carcasses. It makes Leon’s vegetarianism seem like a worthwhile character trait. But at the end of the day, the big bad isn’t killing commuters and feeding them back to us; they’re being fed to someone — or something — else! Denying us the payoff that ordinary citizens are unsuspecting cannibals sort of diminishes the horror. Scary movies should make you rethink some banality in your own daily life, like eating a steak or riding the subway or taking pictures of people getting their skulls caved in.

All that being said, I’m disappointed Lionsgate let this movie die on the vine. It’s got a few flaws, sure, but it’s still great fun with an audience full of gorehounds. We here in L.A. were lucky that the Nuart was able to make that experience possible. Maybe this movie will become a staple of the midnight movie circuit and an underground hit, sort of fitting for a movie that takes place on the subway.

-Brad Lohan

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