Riding that train
Midnight Meat Train / It should have been a sure thing–a hot Japanese horror director, a Clive Barker adaptation from the popular Books Of Blood series and a huge meat-tenderizer hammer. But for whatever reason, distributor Lionsgate dumped the new film, Midnight Meat Train into 109 discount theaters around the country–including Restaurant Row– for an inauspicious “premiere.” Executives at Lionsgate are as silent as the film’s antagonist, played by Guy Ritchie favorite Vinnie Jones (Snatch), but the move has sparked Internet flame wars from horror aficionados.
The plot revolves around Leon Kauffman (Bradley Cooper, channeling Ralph Fiennes), an art photographer eager to break into the gallery circuit with his gritty portraits of New York city life. “No one’s ever captured it,” he says to hot-shot art dealer Susan Hoff, “Not how it really is.”
Trouble is, Hoff (Brooke Shields) doesn’t think Leon’s shots are gritty enough. “If you want to capture the heart of the city, stay put,” she tells him. “Be brave.”
Leon takes her advice, surreptitiously following a group of ne’er-do-wells and photographing their near-assault of a young woman until he decides to intervene. She thanks him for his bravery, and he gets one last shot of her entering the train.
Praised for his new edgy shots, Kauffman looks for more trouble, and finds it in a sinister-looking, stone-faced behemoth of a man named Mahogany. Leon doesn’t witness any wrongdoing but suspects the man is up to no good. The audience, however, is in no doubt, having watched Mahogany sit quietly until a train nearly empties, then dispatch the unlucky lone passenger like Thor, swinging his mighty silver hammer (not naming the killer “Maxwell” seems like a colossal misstep) with enough force to detach eyeballs and even decapitate victims.
Meanwhile, Leon learns the woman he saved has been reported missing, and begins to obsess over her whereabouts. Spotting Mahogony in the background of one his photographs with the girl before she disappeared, Leon tails him to his day job where he works in a (surprise!) meat-packing plant. Shades of Soylent Green, anyone?
The first two acts work surprisingly well for what is essentially an exploitation horror film, but as Leon gets closer to the truth and the conspiracy widens to a larger cast of characters, director Ryuhei Kitamura handles his clues and reveals twists so ham-handedly that you want to shout at the screen, “We got it, movie. We got it. Let’s move on.” The final reveal is so ludicrous that even M. Night Shyamalan would shake his head in derision.
Midnight Meat Train is by no means a great movie, but despite its faults, and in light of other train wrecks in the horror-and-torture-porn genre (Think the Saw and Hostel franchise, along with PG-13 dreck like The Grudge and Prom Night) it’s worth catching, and the one dollar admission certainly makes it justifiable for horror fans to buy the ticket and take the ride.
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