'The Midnight Meat Train' is a fascinating partnership of Japanese genre maven, director Ryuhei Kitamura, with horror novelist Clive Barker.
What seems like an odd pairing at first makes perfect sense upon viewing as the source material is ideal to let Kitamura unleash the stylish, visceral horror thrills he's known for in his native Japan.
Including ‘Quarantine’, I’ve watched two good horror pics in a row, what has a genre fan such as myself done to deserve such a rare (meat that is...) treat?
Upon hearing that 'Versus' and 'Azumi' director Kitamura was going to handle the adaptation, I was cautiously optimistic that this might jumpstart more of Barker's fairly hard to adapt literary work and while the film delivers all I could have hoped for, the shoddy theatrical release from Lion's Gate is yet another backwards step for Barker adaps.
Like H.P. Lovecraft, Barker's work has a surreal, almost too macabre, element to them that usually dissuades adaptations despite the few that have made it usually turning out great i.e. 'Hellraiser', 'Candyman' and even in my opinion 'Nightbreed' and 'Lord of Illusions'.
And now I can add 'The Midnight Meat Train' to the list of well done material with his name, a list that's been sadly disregarded for years as his 'Masters of Horror' eps and 'Jericho' videogame haven't quite been cutting it.
Particularly literate for what amounts to a slasher film, the film gives due time to establish characters. We meet struggling Los Angeles photographer Leon (Bradley Cooper) who gets by but longs for the acceptance of upper society art galleries. Living with girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb), a supportive waitress, he gets a chance to show his work to an art-gallery snob (Brooke Shields) but his photos only hint at what's at the "heart" of the city.
When he can capture that, he can pay her another visit. This motivation sets him off to capture the underbelly of Los Angeles (the menacing, dingy and sparse streets and metro system of downtown).
Capturing some impressive photos of an attempted mugging and rape of a model one night, Leon's presence saved her, but the next day he learned she was killed on the subway he watched her get on.
The snob liked his first photos but wants more so Leon returns to the subway station where he notices a steely-eyed and suspicious man (Vinnie Jones, all quiet rage) with a suit and black bag.
Automatically noticing a menacing photogenic quality about this strange midnight creep, he follows him only to discover that this man may have murdered the model. It ruins nothing to say that the villain, known only as Mahogany, is offing people on the same subway train every night, just waiting for the right time to pull out his tools of death including a sledge hammer and a meat hook from the black bag.
We learn this way before our hero but Leon's obssessiveness is intriguing anyway with this mystery eventually ensnaring girlfriend Maya. What we don't know until the brutal climax is why Mahogany, who works at a butcher plant during the day, is brutally murdering people every night.
For people new to the story, the answer usually raises a few eyebrows and I found the outrageousness of it appallingly funny.
Some of the early reviews I read were surprisingly negative usually pointing out that the film was a bit dull in parts, too much focus on the main characters. The irony being, of course, that slasher pics are generally held in scorn because there's no character development.
I found an almost perfect amalgam of character work and violence here with the murder sequences being more gruesome and entertaining than I've seen in a while.
Including a particularly eye-popping murder, this 'Unrated Director's Cut' is one of the few examples that actually live up to the 'Unrated' label. The violence is more of the visceral 80s style along with obvious influences from director Kitamura's gratuitous gore of past pics and is a refreshing change from the sometimes heavy sod of having to sit through drawn-out torture to get any gore i.e. 'Saw' and 'Hostel' franchises.
CGI-enhanced, the gore is disconcertingly brutal but also balanced out with a certain cartoonishnish of how it's captured. And for me that's not a bad thing as I had a ball with the scenes.
By the time Leon confronts Mahogany with his own slew of butcher weapons, I was leaning up on the coach ready for one hell of a showdown. With lensing by Jonathan Sela and editing by Toby Yates, some scenes take on an almost breathless horror charge thanks to the no-holds-barred gore and swift, appropriately flashy camerawork.
There are admittedly some problems with story structure and character motivation, particularly when handling girlfriend Maya, but as a horror fan, I found very little to complain about here which makes Lion's Gate decision to just dump this in a handful of theaters all the more complexing.
Highly stylized, the film almost has a sterilized look due to the cold blues and grays of downtown L.A., the 2.35:1 1080p AVC encode looks great with nice detail and clarity which makes the ample gore stand out even more. A pounding English 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track does an outstanding job complementing the atmosphere and sparse locations of the visuals.
Special Features start off with an audio commentary by Clive Barker and director Ryuhei Kitamura that's refreshingly candid including the film's treatment from Lion's Gate.
'Clive Barker: The Man Behind the Myth' takes a fifteen-minute look at the novelist and mostly his love for painting. I've never seen Barker interviewed and he's got a fascinatingly gruff voice and eccentric demeanor. 'Mahogany's Tale' is a quick look at the villain and 'Anatomy of a Murder Scene' is a ten-minute featurette on the last crazy subway-set sequence of the film.
I don't really get the rather tepid response this film is getting. I found it stylish, well-made, and shockingly brutal and a fun combination of American 80s horror and Japanese horror sensibilities. Special Features are competent and with great video and audio, this comes highly recommended for horror fans.
The Midnight Meat Train [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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