You didn’t know this about The Midnight Meat Train
We hate to side with the big bad studio, but The Midnight Meat Train despite a great title really does stink like month-old human flesh.
The Midnight Meat Train is a 2008 horror film based on Clive Barker ’s 1984 short story of the same name, which can be found in Volume One of Barker’s collection Books of Blood.
We are then introduced to the character of Leon, a vegan photographer who heads into the city’s subway system at night to take photographs.
With the gritty and detailed hard-edge of early 70s horror films , his flair for CGI augmented visuals and the intense seduction of experimental camera-work in a cinematic environment so increasingly sanitised of actual visceral terror, Kitamura refreshes the genre’s ability to unsettle and provoke audiences and jolt jaded horror enthusiasts out of their PG-13 apathy.
The film follows a photographer who attempts to track down a serial killer dubbed the “Subway Butcher” and discovers more than he bargained for under the city streets.
Leon Kaufman is just another struggling photographer in search of the perfect subject.
A photographer propelled to explore his dark side begins tracking a subway serial killer whose brutal butchery makes for the most nightmarish images ever captured on camera in director Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of a short story by horror heavyweight Clive Barker.
The train in the film is a modified 2200 Chicago elevated car.
Leon attempts to turn some of the photos he has taken of Mahogany in to the police, but they refuse to believe him, and instead cast suspicion on his own motives in photographing the victims.
Adapted from Barker’s seminal anthology, “Books of Blood”, the similarly named “The Midnight Meat Train” is more than just an opportunity for some sophomoric snickering over its title but one of Barker’s most revered short stories about a supernatural serial killer that ekes out fascination, fear and obsession from a lone photographer, Leon Kaufman stumbling upon the butcher’s late night deliveries.
Clive Barker’s more sanguinary inclinations are paid tribute here through a hulking golem, a malevolent meat merchant in his dapper best, named Mahogany who smashes, eviscerates and cleaves through unsuspecting commuters on the last train home.
More interesting than most of the torture-porn or Asian-inspired thrillers that make it to theaters these days, but its tired combination of incongruously pretty fashion-mag photography and outrageously gruesome digital effects is dead on arrival.
Prepossessing the exactitude of traits essential to the character, Jones has the nasty glint in the eye, the mysterious swagger of indestructibility and the imperative of consuming evil, as well as having the benefit of looking like the quiet guy in the corner of the bar who could take out an entire gang of hoodlums without spilling his drink.
Certainly one of the most effective horror films of the year.
Leon’s involvement quickly turns into a dark obsession, upsetting his waitress girlfriend Maya, who is as disbelieving of his story as the police chief.
Director Ryuhei Kitamura offers up one of the year’s most brutally alluring gore fests in his American debut.
Producer Joe Daley, a long time friend of Buhler’s, brought the two writers together and helped develop the script, along with producers Anthony Diblasi and Jorge Saralegui, for their newly minted horror factory The Midnight Picture Company.
The film was directed by Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura and stars Bradley Cooper, Leslie Bibb, Vinnie Jones and Brooke Shields.
A police official directs the misguided Maya to a trip on the midnight train.
As of this entry, The Midnight Picture Company was busy shooting Book of Blood, the next film adaptation from the anthology of short stories that spawned Midnight Meat Train.
