The Midnight Meat Train Review

There’s a pretty clear trend in the works of one Mr Clive Barker (a theme that I’m sympathetic with in real life) which goes as follows: heteronormative people are boring. The most obvious and outstanding example of this is Hellraiser/The Hellbound Heart, which obsesses over the way Frank and Julia transgress social norms and presents the BDSM devilangel Cenobites as the centrepiece of the movie; our literal main character, Kirsty, is there more out of a nod to the necessity of narrative structure. In the epic fantasy tale Weaveworld the evil witch Immacolata and her sisters, as well the shady salesman Shadwell, have personalities that dominate the narrative whenever they appear, compared to, again, literal main characters Cal and Suanna who practically vanish into the furnishings (if you’ll pard on the pun). In Cabal (and presumably Nightbreed) our straight main characters are made more engaging by portraying them in a heightened manner; Boone’s precarious mental state starts with him being gaslit into jabbering madness and his partner’s adoration for him is transformed into an obsession that feels perverse. More grounded characters like Kirsty and Cal allow the audiences to find a way into the story without identifying themselves with the freakish excesses, but that limits them and makes them so much more beige than the colourful world and people that surround them.

All of which is to say that it is very much in the spirit of Clive Barker’s works that the central couple of The Midnight Meat Train are boring as fuck. Leon (Bradley Cooper) is a freelance photographer who specialises in selling pictures of crime scenes to local newspapers. His work, however, is considered potentially more than just sensationalist sleaze - a local art curator (Brooke Shields) is interested in his work, but wants him to not shy away from capturing violence at its most brutal. When he encounters and stops an attempted rape happening in a subway station, only to find out that the woman he saved becomes a victim  of a string of disappearances happening in New Yorks subway trains, a door is opened to a world of greater violence that might serve his ambitions.

Notice how, through all of that, there is no mention of his girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb)? The emotional core of the movie hinges on their relationship, but she does very little beyond exist and work at a diner. Plot things move forward with or without her, and the characters are all sketched so thinly through the use of dialogue that manages the double header of generic and awkward, it is hard not to feel like their relationship (and her as a character) are inessential and unengaging. It is also entirely not in the original short story, which at under twenty pages long was admittedly going to need beefed up.

So if the emotional core of the movie fails utterly, is there anywhere where it succeeds? Back in the late 00s Gore Verbinski remade The Ring and decided that he wanted movies to look a little more like Kermit the Frog. The Ring was a sensation, children throughout the land whispered about the incredible levels of green it had attained, and as such everyone and their mother (if they were a nepo baby) started to slap heavy handed colour correction on films as a stylistic choice. Films from that era have a heightened unreality to them, which is always a little bit ugly.

Amongst a crowded field, The Midnight Meat Train is a particularly off looking example. It’s shiny neon grime and crushed shadows give the whole film and garish quality. The ridiculous CGI doesn’t help matters either, with dangling eyeballs and vibrant red entrails, often splattering towards the screen in a way that makes me think it was meant to be 3D. The first time we see Leon he is clearly chroma keyed against a backdrop, and it instantly sets the visual tone.

Clive Barker described it as “a beautifully stylish, scary movie”, which is true if your bar for scary and stylish is Looney Toon cartoons. When Vinny Jone’s villain character, wielding an absurdly shiny meat tenderiser, murders a woman her head whirls around so fast it literally made my friend burst out laughing.

This, perhaps, is the key to actually enjoying this movie: it’s cartoon nonsense, post-Raimi/Jackson splatterfest. The garish ugliness of the films aesthetic does confer a sense of sleaze and exploitativeness that cycles back to being kind of fun. There are even a couple of moments where the CGI gets out of the way and lets practical effects take over. Within the era of torture porn, these CGI-free moments are genuinely grisly and brutal. Director Ryuhei Kitamura doesn’t believe getting out of the way  of the story either, and there’s at least one fight scene that is so comically overdirected it cycles back around to being sort-of legitimately spectacular. The Midnight Meat Train undoubtedly embodies a heightened sensationalism and a sense of spectacle that gives it a real charm.

There’s a lot of legitimately entertaining aspects of The Midnight Meat Train, and even a thematic core that could have been something; photography of graphic violence as entertainment and so on. With more nuanced script it could really have been something, which is surprising since Barker himself is attached as an Exec Producer. Candyman this ain’t.

One of the least sleazy parts of the movie is a sex scene between Leon and Maya, which typifies the problem with them as characters and their relationship; it is over forced and tries way too hard, and as such mostly feels boring and superfluous. Ultimately, The Midnight Meat Train spends far too long lingering on an undercooked and bland central romance, and if the least sleazy part of your movie is the sex scenes, then something isn’t quite coming together.

The Boogeyman - Review

In a way it feels reductive to say that the entire direction of the canon of Western horror, especially in film form, can be drawn across the laylines laid down by one Stevie King, but to say otherwise would feel dishonest. It is upon his coke and alcohol fuelled blueprints we build our cities. He is the sewers and the plumbing; he is the cherubic gargoyles and the craggy grotesques. Upon watching Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman it felt almost pointless to learn later that the film is an adaptation of a King short. Even if it wasn’t, it still would be.

It is tempting, even outside of the shadowy monolith of Stephen King (of the lesbians), to talk of the prominent horror filmmakers whose finger prints can be found in The Boogeyman. Wan, Flanagan, Jennifer Kent. But what are we all if not the strange collection of inherited neurosis passed onto us by our parents (and that scene from It)? At some point The Boogeyman must stand on its own feet.

As must Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher), who has just lost her mother in an accident. Bullied at school, she finds herself herself with a younger sister who has developed a fear of the dark and a father who, despite being a therapist, refuses to open up to his daughters about his own loss. Compounding the difficulties, a strange man turns up at their house for a therapy session who may (read:will) be bad news.

In both life and movie making, there’s a lot to be said about specialisation. Being too general risks mediocrity. There’s a reason the English language idiom cautioning against being “all things to all people”. Try to please everyone and you risk pleasing no one.

So what is The Boogeyman? Based on director Rob Savage’s previous work it would be not unfair to expect a simple ghost train ride, something he has shown himself to be a dab hand at already. Indeed, there’s a lot of the demarcation of that style of storytelling in here: slow, dark camera crawls, set pieces that build towards jump scares, a monster costume that doesn’t quite hold up when you see too much of it. They’re well crafted too, with a real eye for imagery. Of special note is younger sister Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair)’s particular choice of lighting. But the script is too interested in the interiority of the characters to be a pure jump-scare fest, paced 

So is this a family drama? Certainly some of the stronger parts of the movie is the time taken, the patience of both tone and pacing, in creating the aforementioned sense of interiority with the characters. The pace is good too, a mid pace between slow lingering and twitchily overexcited.

When the family members interact it is easy to see a warmth behind the distance created by the tragedy they have suffered. There is, however, the problem that not only does the father figure basically just disappear for a chunk of the movie, but also the fact their interpersonal drama never really propels the narrative. Not many of the big moments in the movie are really about their relationship.

Wait! I hear you say - this is 2023! It must all be an artsy metaphor for trauma. There’s potential febrile ground there: the dramatic, as opposed to narrative, premise is that the film is about a family mourning the loss of their matriarch. Could this haunting be a manifestation of their grief? Thematically, the movie tips on the inert. Those themes are in there, but are not particularly explicitly or implicitly developed. There’s some great earthy bits of production design, and therapy and communication exists as a motif, but those dots aren’t connecting. When Sadie asks her father (Chris Messina) to talk to her, the movie is as reticent as her father to do anything substantial with the invitation.

There’s a lot in there to like, but all of the very decent pieces of the film have not been assembled into the best version of itself. The Boogeyman is, quite simply, a jack of all trades. In its own way it is fascinating for that. Here’s the finger prints of the way Wan and Wannel reshaped popcorn horror in the 00s, Flanagan’s tight writing and dramatic maturity, the “elevated” trauma porn of Hereditary and The Babadook: here’s a film which is the last ten or more years of a horror, and is not a particularly good example of any of it.

If this review seems rather negative, I’ll leave you with this: when I stepped out of the cinema, my friend immediately declared that it was “better than it needed to be.” For what it is worth, I agree, and there’s nothing wrong with that.