Lionsgate buried Midnight Meat Train releasing it in only 102 theaters for only two weeks. It managed a meager $83k as a result despite earning over $3 million in foreign markets. The decision doesn’t come as a huge surprise considering this is a hard-R horror film with very little name recognition and one of the corniest names I have ever seen. Telling your friends you are heading out to see Midnight Meat Train is likely to stir up more confusion than it’s worth and even though the title is a little bit fun I definitely think it was a contributing factor to the film’s overall demise.
However, it still has life. It has a DVD life, a format where horror movies of this kind thrive and considering this is a horror film with Clive Barker’s name attached and Versus helmer Ryuhei Kitamura directing there is certainly reason to believe the horror community would turn out to give this one a chance. Horror centered movie websites have championed the film, primarily as overcompensation for its ill-treatment, and Barker has been quite vocal in his distaste for the treatment of the film by Lionsgate, something he continues on the audio commentary on this disc, but not to any real inflammatory extent for those of you looking for some juicy gossip.
All things considered, I remained rather disinterested and only mildly curious as to what this film would offer. It would be a nice film to have under my belt for future film discussions, but other than that I didn’t expect much as studios don’t necessarily abandon movies that are any good. As it turns out, Midnight Meat Train isn’t all bad and it actually manages to take advantage of what is typically a cliché story starter and make it work. The ending is a bit silly since it comes entirely out of nowhere and not a lot is done with it as a result, but when it comes to gory horror, you could certainly do worse than this one.
The film stars Bradley Cooper as an aspiring photog who gets his lucky break when he shows his work to a prominent gallery owner played by Brooke Shields in a throwaway (yet harmless) role. She encourages him to look into the darker realms of the city and in his search he comes across a mysterious man whom he suspects is involved in some terrible things. Guess what, he is.
This is not an actor’s piece so to discuss the acting is worthless, although credit goes to Vinnie Jones whose character only has one line of dialogue and it is garbled at that. His only direction is to kill with no mercy and look evil at all times. He does just fine. Perhaps the hand clapping should be saved for a cameo appearance by Ted Raimi who is involved with the film’s giant early kill scene and it is an impressive endeavor as it involves Raimi’s character getting hit in the back of the head causing his CG eyeballs to pop out landing on the camera and then onto the floor. This is proceeded by a young female slipping on one of the eyes, landing on her back as we get a shot of Vinnie coming at her from her perspective. Chop. The camera pulls back to reveal a glassy eye, a decapitated body and a river of blood. Listening to the commentary you realize a lot of this was cut out in the theatrical release, but it is all here now and it is gory and actually quite fun thanks to the work of Kitamura and his DP Jonathan Sela. Another scene later on involves a 360-degree set piece of horror that is a bit disorienting, but deserves an A-for-effort.
When it comes to special features the audio commentary with Barker and Kitamura is definitely the highlight, much to my surprise since Barker’s voice is a gravelly mess, but it didn’t bother me as much as I expected it to. You get a lot of insight as to what was cut from the theatrical release, conversation over the release dispute, problem Kitamura had with the producers and a whole lot more. It is surprisingly good. Beyond that the three featurettes are pretty much typical and the Barker feature should be interesting for fans, but I wasn’t all that interested.
Midnight Meat Train is definitely worth a rental for all horror fans, as far as a buy that decision is up to you. I think I have given you enough to help gauge if you think it is worth a blind buy, but a rental will definitely clear it all up for you. The features are decent with the commentary definitely worth a listen and overall I can’t blame Lionsgate for not going with a theatrical release since I am not sure it would have done all that well, but at least they didn’t censor the commentary and still gave it a proper uncut release.
