Models and Boy Scouts advised to avoid riding subways alone after 2am - 'Midnight Meat Train' Review…
Posted on August 10, 2008 - 12:36am by michael
It is one of my unwritten principles about film criticism never to say things like “Such-and-such movie could only have come from the mind of so-and-so.” It’s a self-congratulatory phrase that sell-out critics (film critics and books critics alike) use in efforts to get their names on movie or book covers, and having been a fan of writers like Clive Barker and Stephen King since I was about 11 years old, I’ve heard it more than enough times for it to have become an empty cliché in my mind.
Nevertheless, The Midnight Meat Train, my friends, could only have come from the mind of Clive Barker.
Sorry about that.
It has been probably something like 15 years since I read Barker's Books of Blood, and pretty much the only thing I remembered very clearly from The Midnight Meat Train were the creatures on the train and that thing with the tongue at the end of the story. That's an image that won't leave your mind easily! I also recommend reading "The Skins of the Fathers" and "The Body Politic," the latter of which was featured in the disappointing film Quicksilver Highway.
Bradley Cooper stars as Leon, young photographer desperate to earn the recognition of a local famous artist named Susan Hoff. Unfortunately, his main technique is the gigantic cliché of trying to “capture the city as it really is,” which has to be the most uninteresting goal imaginable for any photographer. Maybe he doesn’t understand for how many decades that exact same thing has been pursued by countless tens of thousands of photographers. As is to be expected, Susan is unimpressed and wants something more, so Leon soon finds himself perusing the late-night subways trying to catch the perfect stills of violent crimes in progress.
He discovers a man who has a habit of riding the last train past the last stop and butchering the remaining subway inhabitants like cattle, and Leon becomes obsessed with getting to the bottom of the crimes, only to discover that this particular series of murders has a history that can be traced back well over a century.
[caption id="attachment_24080" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mahogany - not the guy you want to be caught stalking..."]
[/caption]
The movie is padded pretty heavily, of course, given that it’s adapted from a short story, but for the most part it stays true to the original tale. Mostly, certain things are fleshed out a lot more, characters are added, and other side elements are added completely, but the disturbing heart of the story is here.
We could easily have done without Leon’s atrocious girlfriend, however. She has to be the whiniest, most self-righteous and controlling woman that I’ve seen in a movie in years. They are meant to be getting married soon, and when Leon photographs an attempted gang-rape in progress and then the victim later goes missing (and the police don’t believe anything is really going on), his girlfriend is not for one second supportive or interested or even concerned, she simply instructs him not to take night photography anymore. She informs him that he is to turn in his photos to the police and move on. She also has an emotional scene in the second half of the movie that is such a preposterously bad piece of acting that it made me want to throw myself in front of a meat train!
As a horror movie it works surprisingly well. There is at least one shot that I’ve never seen done in any horror movie, and I’ve been a pretty avid horror fan for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, there are also more than a few scenes that simply make no sense whatsoever.
Mahogany, the “butcher” (played by Vinnie Jones) has bloody gastric problems that are never really quite explained, although the more distracting aberration is his bizarre outbreak of marble-sized moles or warts that covers his chest, which he routinely cuts off with a scalpel and collects in jars in his medicine cabinet. It’s a satisfactorily horrible affliction, to be sure, but it would have been nice if it hadn’t just been thrown in randomly for effect.
I was also a little confused by the asian hottie that gets assaulted near the beginning of the movie. She nearly gets gang-raped by a group of gangsters, is barely saved, and proceeds to get on the subway alone anyway. It was weird enough that she was riding the subway home alone in the middle of the night anyway (she’s a MODEL, by the way), but man, she sure made a quick recovery from the attack! Later, a group of kids are walking through the subway selling fund-raiser candy bars at 2am. I hope they get a dedication merit badge for that!
The movie is shot in a properly metallic blue that permeates just about every shot of the movie, never letting you forget that you’re looking at a series of horror movie sets, but this is still leaps and bounds better than the vast majority of horror movies being heaved into theaters these days.
It has buckets and buckets of gore and so will definitely satisfy the gore-hounds, but it has an interesting story which prevents it from coming off as a stupid, mindless orgy of violence, like Eli Roth’s head-smackingly stupid film Hostel.
The thing that I have always appreciated about Clive Barker’s stories (and Stephen King’s) is that the better ones are not just scary movies, they have something of what Freud called the “uncanny.” They tell stories of familiar things, familiar objects, but cast them in a light and place them in surroundings that make them off-putting on a level that lesser horror films can’t even begin to aspire to. So even when the CGI blood effects are laughably bad, the arc of the story is taking us somewhere so different than what we’re used to that it’s pretty easy to overlook. For horror fans, this is a definite must-see.
The Bean Meter
[caption id="attachment_24086" align="aligncenter" width="299" caption="4 Beans out of 5."]
[/caption]
It is one of my unwritten principles about film criticism never to say things like “Such-and-such movie could only have come from the mind of so-and-so.” It’s a self-congratulatory phrase that sell-out critics (film critics and books critics alike) use in efforts to get their names on movie or book covers, and having been a fan of writers like Clive Barker and Stephen King since I was about 11 years old, I’ve heard it more than enough times for it to have become an empty cliché in my mind.
Nevertheless, The Midnight Meat Train, my friends, could only have come from the mind of Clive Barker.
Sorry about that.
It has been probably something like 15 years since I read Barker's Books of Blood, and pretty much the only thing I remembered very clearly from The Midnight Meat Train were the creatures on the train and that thing with the tongue at the end of the story. That's an image that won't leave your mind easily! I also recommend reading "The Skins of the Fathers" and "The Body Politic," the latter of which was featured in the disappointing film Quicksilver Highway.
Bradley Cooper stars as Leon, young photographer desperate to earn the recognition of a local famous artist named Susan Hoff. Unfortunately, his main technique is the gigantic cliché of trying to “capture the city as it really is,” which has to be the most uninteresting goal imaginable for any photographer. Maybe he doesn’t understand for how many decades that exact same thing has been pursued by countless tens of thousands of photographers. As is to be expected, Susan is unimpressed and wants something more, so Leon soon finds himself perusing the late-night subways trying to catch the perfect stills of violent crimes in progress.
He discovers a man who has a habit of riding the last train past the last stop and butchering the remaining subway inhabitants like cattle, and Leon becomes obsessed with getting to the bottom of the crimes, only to discover that this particular series of murders has a history that can be traced back well over a century.
[caption id="attachment_24080" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mahogany - not the guy you want to be caught stalking..."]
[/caption]
The movie is padded pretty heavily, of course, given that it’s adapted from a short story, but for the most part it stays true to the original tale. Mostly, certain things are fleshed out a lot more, characters are added, and other side elements are added completely, but the disturbing heart of the story is here.
We could easily have done without Leon’s atrocious girlfriend, however. She has to be the whiniest, most self-righteous and controlling woman that I’ve seen in a movie in years. They are meant to be getting married soon, and when Leon photographs an attempted gang-rape in progress and then the victim later goes missing (and the police don’t believe anything is really going on), his girlfriend is not for one second supportive or interested or even concerned, she simply instructs him not to take night photography anymore. She informs him that he is to turn in his photos to the police and move on. She also has an emotional scene in the second half of the movie that is such a preposterously bad piece of acting that it made me want to throw myself in front of a meat train!
As a horror movie it works surprisingly well. There is at least one shot that I’ve never seen done in any horror movie, and I’ve been a pretty avid horror fan for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, there are also more than a few scenes that simply make no sense whatsoever.
Mahogany, the “butcher” (played by Vinnie Jones) has bloody gastric problems that are never really quite explained, although the more distracting aberration is his bizarre outbreak of marble-sized moles or warts that covers his chest, which he routinely cuts off with a scalpel and collects in jars in his medicine cabinet. It’s a satisfactorily horrible affliction, to be sure, but it would have been nice if it hadn’t just been thrown in randomly for effect.
I was also a little confused by the asian hottie that gets assaulted near the beginning of the movie. She nearly gets gang-raped by a group of gangsters, is barely saved, and proceeds to get on the subway alone anyway. It was weird enough that she was riding the subway home alone in the middle of the night anyway (she’s a MODEL, by the way), but man, she sure made a quick recovery from the attack! Later, a group of kids are walking through the subway selling fund-raiser candy bars at 2am. I hope they get a dedication merit badge for that!
The movie is shot in a properly metallic blue that permeates just about every shot of the movie, never letting you forget that you’re looking at a series of horror movie sets, but this is still leaps and bounds better than the vast majority of horror movies being heaved into theaters these days. 
It has buckets and buckets of gore and so will definitely satisfy the gore-hounds, but it has an interesting story which prevents it from coming off as a stupid, mindless orgy of violence, like Eli Roth’s head-smackingly stupid film Hostel.
The thing that I have always appreciated about Clive Barker’s stories (and Stephen King’s) is that the better ones are not just scary movies, they have something of what Freud called the “uncanny.” They tell stories of familiar things, familiar objects, but cast them in a light and place them in surroundings that make them off-putting on a level that lesser horror films can’t even begin to aspire to. So even when the CGI blood effects are laughably bad, the arc of the story is taking us somewhere so different than what we’re used to that it’s pretty easy to overlook. For horror fans, this is a definite must-see.
The Bean Meter
[caption id="attachment_24086" align="aligncenter" width="299" caption="4 Beans out of 5."]
