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.