The Midnight Meat Train (dir. Ryuhei Kitamura, 2008)
Clive Barker, born on this date in 1952, is an English writer, visual artist, and filmmaker best known for Hellraiser and his 1985 short story collection The Books of Blood, a major work in the so-called splatterpunk movement of horror fiction and the source material of such films as Candyman; Lord of Illusion; Rawhead Rex (Jesus Christ, that title); and our movie of the moment, The Midnight Meat Train.
He also has a voice that sounds like Tom Waits with a severe case of laryngitis affecting a Liverpudlian accent.
I should admit upfront that I can only judge Barker on the basis of his films and others adapting his work, having never read any of his fiction. The first film of the Hellraiser franchise is by far the strongest in a series of rapidly diminishing returns, and Candyman is a fine exploration of urban legends and racism, while also featuring more bees than a Jerry Seinfeld abomination of a cartoon. Lord of Illusion is completely forgettable, and I am incapable of even looking at the title Rawhead Rex without wondering what that is a euphemism for.
Speaking of which: Midnight Meat Train. Good god. I thought “riding the F train” sounded gauche.
Before Bradley Cooper was a shoo-in for multiple Academy Awards, he starred in The Midnight Meat Train. Hey, Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger have Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation on their resume, so he’s in esteemed company. Cooper plays a vegan street photographer, which is about as discouraging a protagonist as you can imagine. He’s trying to capture the gritty truth of a city that is presumably New York, but was obviously filmed in downtown Los Angeles and its hundred feet of train line. Unfortunately, this film was made in 2008 when his natural home Vice was merely a Montreal-based magazine run by terrible men and not the media empire it is today still run by terrible men, so he is trying to break into the art scene. A woman he saved from a sexually assault mysteriously disappears on the subway, leading Cooper to find out what happened to her.
The culprit is Mahogany, a mute serial killer and slaughterhouse employee played by everyone’s least favorite English footballer turned actor Vinnie Jones. He stalks the train cars, beating innocent victims to death with a meat tenderizer in flourishes of CGI violence that veer wildly between gory and goofy. The corpses are then removed from the train to a mysterious elsewhere in a nightly ritual that might explain why the city seems so depopulated–I mean, beyond being filmed in downtown Los Angeles in 2008.
Something is happening here, as they say, and the rest of the film is dedicated to revealing the secret being these killings.
This was no one’s finest moment, except maybe for Vinnie Jones when he briefly holds a human skull and comes as close as he ever will to playing Hamlet.. The film was given only a limited release and tanked at the box office harder than the economy would a month later. Critical reception was somewhat better, and to be fair, it’s not exactly a bad movie. The story works for what it is, but Kitamura’s direction is unnecessarily polished. There’s a sheen over everything that betrays the grittiness and brutality that the film. requires. If you’re a Barker fanatic, maybe it will work more for you.
October 5, 2018
oliveresque 