All Aboard

Horror auteur Clive Barker’s 1984 short story forms the basis for the movie adaptation of The Midnight Meat Train.
(Lions Gate; 103 minutes; unrated; widescreen; 2008), a literal
slaughterhouse set mostly in New York City’s underground subway
tunnels. Photographer Leon Kaufman (Bradley Cooper) wants to get away
from his dead-end work as a shutterbug during police calls, citing his
own artistic muse for “capturing the heart of the city.” Art dealer
Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields) convinces Leon to get down and dirty with
his subjects, mostly the nocturnal flotsam that haunts the subway
system while the city sleeps. 

Leon soon focuses on a buttoned-down bruiser (Brit
soccer star Vinnie Jones) who spends his days toiling at a meat-packing
plant—and his nights aboard a specific subway train in which the late,
late riders are unaware that they will never reach their destination.
Leon gets the gritty images he needs to succeed, but this wanna-be
Weegee also realizes that he’s caught up in a web of conspiracy and
corpses, and his loyal girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb) could be next on
the hit list.

It’s unusual for a savvy distributor like Lions Gate, which made its fortune with the Saw
franchise, to bury a genre flick with potential box-office value. Yet
despite a salable title and Barker’s cultish cachet, the studio dumped
this flick into dollar houses last summer, then placed it into rotation
as an on-demand item on the Fearnet cable channel during Halloween. So
perhaps Lions Gate Home Entertainment is making some belated amends for
Midnight Meat Train’s theatrical mistreatment: The DVD offers an
unrated director’s cut, restoring two minutes of extremely grisly
carnage excised from director Ryuhei Kitamura’s compromised R-rated
version. And in a genuine rarity, Barker and Kitamura discuss their
profound misgivings with the studio during the commentary track.

The movie itself is never really
believable, and its version of Manhattan, albeit shot in Los Angeles,
seems deliberately un-Big Apple-like. Shields’ art dealer borders on
arch parody, especially when she delivers repartee like this:
“Punctuality is a virtue of the mediocre. Do you know when I first
thought Basquiat was a genius? When he was three days late for lunch.”
But on its own warped wavelength, cued by Barker’s own fascinations for
otherworldly bloodlust and painful perversities, as well as references
to the movies Blow Up and Raw Meat, it’s a wild-ass ride. 

Kitamura emphasizes actor Jones’
glowering menace to the nth degree; referred to only as “Mahogany” in a
few lines of dialogue, Jones’ mute killer comes across as a Forrest
Gump bogeyman (one soon-to-be victim disses him with “Life is like a
box of chocolates”), as he calmly waits with his doctor’s bag until he
sets his sights on an unwary strap-hanger aboard Manhattan’s most
graffiti-free subway—then pulls out his sledgehammer to administer last
rites. Much like Barker’s features Hellraiser and Nightbreed,
Kitamura also enjoys envelope-pushing horror techniques with his
gleeful, gruesome set pieces. The uncut DVD features gore galore when
Mahogany offers some hammer time to one victim (genre regular Ted Raimi
in an—ahem—eye-popping performance), then Kitamura follows with an
audacious point-of-view shot from a separated noggin’s perspective, as
the screen is filled with crimson corpuscles that splatter like
choreographed raindrops from Singin’ in the Rain. 

The movie is on shakier ground when
Leon, tainted by his growing obsessiveness with Mahogany, undergoes his
own personal transformation, from vegan nice guy to meat-eating dark
sider, with his animalistic tendencies clarified during a rough-sex
interlude with Maya. David Cronenberg might have better handled these
extremes in character behavior, yet even Cronenberg, hailed as a master
of “venereal horror,” would have applauded Kitamura’s inclusion of a
truly yechhy scene devoted to Mahogany snipping off warty lesions from
his chest, then keeping them in pickle jars. Ewwwww.

The widescreen DVD looks great in its
letterboxed (2.35:1 ratio) rendering, especially the azure blue color
scheme employed during the many subway sequences. Extras include “Clive
Barker: The Man Behind the Myth” (15 minutes), a brief overview of the
author’s career (he cites Stephen King’s quote, “I have seen the future
of horror and his name is Clive Barker,” as his breakthrough in the
publishing business), plus a glimpse into his sideline as a painter;
“Mahogany’s Tale” (five minutes), Kitamura and Barker’s attempt to
create a new horror icon, as they extol the “tragic complexity” of
their serial killer; and “Anatomy of a Murder Scene” (nine minutes), a
tongue-in-cheek rundown of the storyboards and special effects used to
create the savage brutality of that death scene with actor Raimi. 

Still, the aforementioned commentary
track is worth a listen; Barker introduces himself with “This is how
the movie was made and screwed around with,” then later acknowledges
“the elephant in the room” as he is unafraid to name names by telling
his side of the story, one that involves a studio regime change and
broken promises. Aside from the simmering vitriol, Barker and Kitamura
still manage to impart lots of information on the filmmaking process,
some of it quite amusing. While discussing the trims of the
eyeball-flying sequence demanded by the Motion Picture Association of
America to secure an R rating, Kitamura proudly declares, “The MPAA hated this scene!”