Review – The Midnight Meat Train

Clive Barker’s latest film adaptation of one of his Books of Blood short story, The Midnight Meat Train is due for release in the UK this Friday, perhaps most fittingly on Halloween.

Drew and I unfortunately missed The Midnight Meat Train when it was shown in this year’s FrightFest and again when we were invited to an interview session with the man himself, Clive Barker (sometimes, living in Devon has its real drawbacks). I’m a pretty big fan of Clive Barker’s work, especially his earlier books and of course the first Hellraiser as well as Nightbreed. Having met Clive Barker twice over 17 years ago I was really sad that I couldn’t make it to the interview opportunity.

Lucky for us, our man on the inside (actually he works for the company doing the promotion for the film), sent Drew and I a copy of the film to review before its main release this Friday.

Next stop, death

When his latest body of work – provocative, nighttime studies of the city and its inhabitants — earns struggling photographer Leon Kaufman (Bradley Cooper) interest from a prominent art gallerist (Brooke Shields), she propels him to get grittier and show the darker side of humanity for his upcoming debut at her downtown art space.

Believing he’s finally on track for success, Leon’s obsessive pursuit of dark subject matter leads him into the path of a serial killer, Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), the subway murderer who stalks late-night commuters — ultimately butchering them in the most gruesome ways imaginable.

With his concerned girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb) fearing for his life, Leon’s relentless fascination with Mahogany lures him further and further into the bowels of the subways and ultimately into an abyss of pure evil – inadvertently pulling Maya right along with him.

Drew – It is really weird how the presence of ROGER BART (aka. the psycho pharmacist who fatally got on the wrong side of Desperate Housewives’ Bree) reassured me that The Midnight Meat Train was going to be a journey I wanted to take!

Slasher movies, teen gore and morally repugnant horror are simply not my thing and frankly annoy me. Clive Barker, his movies, books and art inhabit a peculiar and uncomfortable zone. He can haphazardly slop very close to being annoying.

Thankfully, TMMT stays right on track and dishes out a good dollop of old fashioned horror and it certainly gets you to your scary destination, just about on time! This is largely due to the presence of not just Roger Bart but also Bradley Cooper – Leon (Wedding Crashers and Wet Hot American Summer) and Leslie Bibb – Maya (Ironman). Bradley, by the way, is about to hit the A list movie glitterati, soon to be starring opposite Affleck, Barrymore & Carey and that’s just the ABC’s. Believe me, this boys star is on the way up. He has to bridge two persona’s in this movie and achieves something that his co-star Vinnie Jones – Mahogany (Nasty Fucking Git), will never do.

Vinnie is menacing, and this is where Clive Barker & his director Ryuhei Kitamura get so close to slopping over in to the annoying. I was so glad when I realised Vinnie only opens his mouth to speak one word! Make no mistake, this is not a daft Vinnie appearance. He gets to wear on the outside, what we all know is lurking only partly leashed, on the inside. He is a right bastard.

Calling this movie The Midnight Meat Train is a calculated gamble on the part of Barker, as no doubt many movie goers, my self included, might be put off from seeing it simply because of the word ‘Meat’ in the title. Barker just has to get so close to being irritating, and yet manages to get away with it, a bit like Vinnie Jones perhaps?

So many horror movies pushed out these days should be cut and dumped amid the bright red fake blood and wobbly rubber body parts, but not this one.

TMMT is a good scary flick, go and see this movie as it is a classy piece of horror.

Skip – It’s always difficult for me to review a horror movie, because anything that is closely related to horror and I’m there and having fun like the proverbial pig in shit. It doesn’t matter how well or badly they are reviewed, I’ll always find something that has me hooked enough to continue watching from behind my bucket of popcorn.

With Clive Barker’s works put onto celluloid, it can sometimes be a mixed bag, though I blame the studios more for this. Clive Barker movies have given us some of the most iconic characters from horror to splatter across the screen, most notably Hellraiser’s Pinhead and Candyman’s Daniel Robitaille.

Unfortunately they fall foul to the same need to make money and turn it into a franchise. While the two Candyman sequels didn’t have the same impact as the first (the first film scared the heebie jeebies out of me), the Hellraiser franchise hasn’t faired so well and with a possible remake of the original looming close, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to enjoy The Midnight Meat Train.

Like Drew, I’m glad to have been proved wrong. What starts off as a serial killer movie, The Midnight Meat Train progresses into a story of dark obsessions, age old secrets and conspiracy, and ultimately the supernatural – as Leon’s (Bradley Cooper) photography crosses paths with the silent and menacing killer Mahogany (Vinnie Jones).

While the cast do a great job, for me the casting of Vinnie Jones was just perfect, he does what come natural to him… Silent. Scary. Sadistic. You know when Vinnie’s on screen he’s going to deliver. Such is the intensity of his portrayal of Mahogany, especially when he’s working his way through a train of unsuspecting victims, I can easily say it’s his best performance yet. Not bad for an English ex-footballer. Mahogany may not be as iconic as Pinhead or Daniel Robitaille, but he’s very close to Nightbreed’s psychotic psychiatrist Dr. Philip K. Decker (as played by director David Cronenberg).

And speaking of victims, Ted Raimi makes a brief but welcome return to a Clive Barker film after playing the role of Billy in Candyman, who chickens out of saying “Candyman” in the mirror for a fifth time, before his girlfriend does.

As for the film, although there are some very graphic scenes, fans will recognise the style of director Ryuhei Kitamura’s other films such as Versus and the two Azumi. Though I suspect with a bigger budget, Ryuhei Kitamura latest offering it is a huge improvement in terms of delivering visceral horror. And while the subject matter is gruesome (a serial killing butcher carving up meat), it has nothing in common with films like the Hostel and Saw series.

The director does seem to rush the ending and the big reveal happens a bit too quickly in my opinion, likewise with the supernatural tone of story. While Mahogany’s strength and perception of Leon following him does suggest an unnerving or unnatural ability to sense those around him, the explanation is only shown at the end of the movie with the reveal.

Barker hopes that the film will offer audiences an experience that will dare them to keep looking at the screen. And he notes that there is also a lot of character development in the film. “I think you’re going to care about these people,” he says. “We’ve got some wonderful performances and marvelous actors. It’s not a simple story. It’s a complex tale of somebody giving up their social identity and their identity as a lover to become something else, to become a servant of darkness, which is a choice we perhaps all sometimes have to make.”

I agree with what Clive Barker says about the character development as both Drew and I cared for the characters, most notably Bradley Cooper’s Leon as he descended not only into the subway but into darkness and Leslie Bibb’s Maya, as she desperately attempts to save him from his obsession with Mahogany and the evil around him. The Midnight Meat Train is good horror and one to watch this Halloween. It also has the added bonus of putting a Clive Barker story back onto the big screen, which in my book of blood is a very good thing.

The Midnight Meat Train is out on general release in the UK Friday 31st October 2008.