Listen, horror. I’ve said it before. I hate literally everything
about your genre. I can’t abide gore unless it is camp. Cold-blooded
skull squishery does not interest me, nor does Ted Raimi’s eyeball
blasting from its socket, nor does a human strung up and bleeding out
like a slaughtered piggy. Nor monsters. It’s nothing personal, I just
DO NOT WANT IT IN MY AREA. Pleeeeease!
Even though my heart screams “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU
PEOPLE?” I do, in fact, have a heart. And so I feel for all
the crestfallen horror fans—Clive Barker
included—protesting Lionsgate’s extremely limited distribution of
Barker’s latest production, The Midnight Meat Train.
Based on Barker’s 1984 short story of the same name, The Midnight
Meat Train has been relegated to a sad 100 or so discount theaters
(I saw it in Federal Way for $2). And it’s hard to say why. I’ve seen
far, far worse horror movies on big screens in big
multiplexes—The Hitcher, When a Stranger Calls,
Saw II: Back in the Habit. Why not The Midnight Meat
Train? At least it has Bradley Cooper (xoxo).
In an open letter to horror magazine Fangoria, Barker wrote:
“This has nothing to do with the quality of our picture. In
fact, it is happening to a number of other movies in Lionsgate’s hands,
many of which were guided into production by a great friend of horror
movies, Peter Block, who left the company several months ago… It
seems not to matter that a lot of very talented men and women sweated
to create this picture—knowing that all the horror fans who see
it, will love it. It’s being dumped because of company politics.” Ooh!
Company politics! Oh… oh wait. I’m bored now.
The Midnight Meat Train is the story of an intrepid
photographer (Cooper) who, desperate to make a splash in Brooke
Shields’s pants—I mean, a fancy art gallery—starts
lurking around the subway station at night and snapping ne’er-do-wells
in action. Meanwhile, a giant butcher played by Vinnie Jones is
smooshing the brains of late-night train passengers with silent
efficiency. The acting is awful and the writing silly and the premise
stresses credulity beyond earthly limitations.
After an hour of screeching subway trains and macabre meat
factories, we almost abandoned ship. I’m glad we stayed. The 11th-hour
Big Reveal is so improbable and ridiculous that I actually almost liked
it (it involves magic, kind of, and a vast conspiracy, and a
ritualistic carving that looks far too much like the Van Halen
logo). To me, anything is preferable to a straight-ahead
serial-killer gorefest.
Anyway, unless you’ve already seen it, you’ll most likely have to
experience The Midnight Meat Train on DVD. Which is too bad,
because it means you’ll miss out on experiences like when, after a
particularly awful meat-mallet decapitation, the white-haired
man-mountain next to me yelled, “Hey, her head’s off!” That’s
what moviegoing is all about, people. Curse you, Lionsgate. 
