Indie Review: MEAT TRAIN

The Midnight Meat Train



Starring- Bradley Cooper, Leslie Bibb, Vinnie Jones, Brooke Shields, Roger Bart, Peter Jacobson, Tony Curran



Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura



Grade: D-




"Please step away from the meat."

The Midnight Meat Train is everything the title suggests. It may sound like a cheesy pornography or a football nickname gone wrong, but make no mistakes, Meat Train is a Clive Barker inspired horror film. Dumped into a little over one hundred critically forgotten second-run discount theatres mostly in the Western United States, despite being a new release, Meat Train's trailer, enigmatic title and release made it worth seeking out. But I soon realized, this Meat was rotten.

Because of Lionsgate's internal shuffle, new head honcho Joe Drake (a former exec at Focus Features, which produced the best horror film of 2008 to date, The Strangers), had a couple of projects from the old regime that he had no faith in releasing. Conspiracy theories abound, but these things are true; The studio's Saw V is expected to be the moneymaker, and because it was contractually obligated to appear in a couple of theatres, Midnight Meat Train was given an esoteric release. Buried not only behind popular new movies, but under the tracks of long-time second-run holdouts College Road Trip and Nim's Island.

I was genuinely shocked by that piece of information, considering how some horror movies can truly perform with a little marketing, including the original Saw. But after sitting through 90 minutes of Midnight Meat Train, I began to understand just how smart Lionsgate must be.

The film stars up-and-coming Bradley Cooper (Alias, Wedding Crashers) as Leon Kauffman, a professional photographer without much success. He takes pictures of the dark underbelly of New York City, but can never capture anything truly remarkable. When Susan Hoff (an ubiquitously perky Brooke Shields), the owner of an art gallery Leon tries to sell pictures to, point blankly tells him to get in the face of danger for those once-in-a-lifetime shots, Leon takes it seriously.

So seriously in fact, that he stumbles upon Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), a serial killer who butchers quiet passengers on the subway in the middle of the night and splays them on meat hooks (hence the title, The Midnight Meat Train). Leon starts to become obsessed with taking the right pictures of the murders, despite the element of danger in being exposed. But while his girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb) is worried, Leon finds by studying Mahogany, there's a whole other, deeper, darker facet to his character and reasoning than just mercilessly slaughtering random passengers.

Meat Train's plot is just as ridiculously executed as it is to read. Based off a short story by Barker in his 1984 novel collection, I honestly gave the movie every opportunity to be an enjoyable horror flick. The merits of plot and and sensibility don't always have to make perfect sense in these kinds of films. I'm one of the few positive critics for last year's The Hitcher re-make because of that reason. But Meat Train is just so over-the-top bad without much to praise in the acting, writing or filmmaking department (although for most of the beginning, director Ryuhei Kitamura's blurry camera work was effective), that the project just became one big non-entity.

The characters were just as bad. Each one of them were comically stupid. Cooper's Leon takes photographs of dangerous thugs, homeless people, and the villain with all the subtlety of a lead pipe to the face. He follows Mahogany around with a camera the size of a 1992 cell phone, creeping around 10 feet behind like he's a member of Mystery Inc. Halfway through, after getting too close to the villain (as in, taking pictures of Mahogany in the same subway train that he's literally butchering people in), Cooper does a complete 180 and becomes psycho and gruff, bent on revenge.

Leslie Bibb's Maya is mostly there for support and skin, and for awhile the only one in the movie with a voice of reason. Then just as you figure there's some validation in her, she and Leon's art friend Jurgis (Roger Bart, apparently not satisfied with Hostel II as the goriest pick on his resume) break into Mahogany's apartment to retrieve Leon's camera. Never mind how they even found the place without Leon's help, but Maya finds evidence Mahogany carries in his suitcase that you'd only find in a cliche movie. You can pretty much figure where its going to go from there.

Or not. If you haven't read Barker's story, the last five minutes veers past left field and into the bleachers of weirdness. We go from over-the-top serial killer film to excessively violent supernatural film. It answers those long-standing questions that arise during the movie, such as "Why is he doing this?" and "Why am I watching this?", which in the grand scheme of the film is kind of exalting, but after 95 minutes of a certain kind of terror, changing the course of Meat Train entirely with that ending just adds to the terrible aspects of it.

Maybe it was the stains in the horrendously patterned carpets or the smell of stale relish coating the walls, but seeing Midnight Meat Train at a barely-managed dollar theatre almost enhanced the experience. As dreadful as the film was at times, you almost felt like in the dank and dark confines of the auditorium, you had every much chance to die as the victims in the film. That at least kept the surprisingly low scare factor in Meat Train from totally ruining the experience.

If you have the chance to see The Midnight Meat Train, I suggest you go, if only for the novelty of seeing a unique and distasteful horror flick in the presence of the acidic popcorn and sticky linoleum floors of yesteryear. It may have been given an ultimate backstabbing job by its own hand, but had something as amusingly abnormal as Meat Train been released in major market theatres, I doubt it would've fared much better than last year's parking garage thriller P2. So almost by accident, the fans in the know get two interestingly horrific experiences for the price of less than one.