The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

VERDICT:
5/10 Reasons I Don’t Trust Public Transportation

To answer your question, no, I haven’t started reviewing porn. Just happens to be the worst title of all time for a halfway decent horror movie.

The Midnight Meat Train is a lonely woman whose cable isn’t working, so she puts on her bikini and calls up the hot, studly cable guy to fix it for her…only she wants more than just cable, if you know what I’m sayin’. Oh, SNAP!

Alright, alright. I swear it’s not a porno, just couldn’t help myself.

The Midnight Meat Train is really about a struggling photographer trying to capture the heart of New York City when he accidentally stumbles upon a guy in the subway system that’s brutally murdering late-night train passengers. Naturally, the said serial killer isn’t a big fan of getting his picture taken, so the photographer ends up getting pulled in to the whole thing and his life gets pretty complicated.

It’s not doing wonders for New York tourism, but whatever, we New Yorkers are tough. We can handle the Midnight Meat Train. Fuggedaboutit.

The first time I saw the trailer for this was when I went to see Rambo. No one in the theater had heard of this movie and you could tell by the eerie silence that everyone was surprised at how kickass it looked, what with all the blood and murdering and such. Captions like, “From the mind of horror legend Clive Barker” and “From visionary director Ryuhei Kitamura” started popping on-screen and we were hooked. Then the narrator announced the title with the voice of a man who’s been smoking Cubans right out the womb, and the theater erupted in a combination of laughter and “What the fuck?”s.

But somehow the legitimacy was still there for me. Being that Clive Barker is one crazy dude, and that I had read the short story this movie was based off of, and the movie was free to watch through some loophole in my Time Warner cable service, I figured “Why not? As long as it isn’t horror porn.”

As far as horror movies go, The Midnight Meat Train is okay but pretty forgettable. The dead giveaway for me, aside from the title, should have been that whenever you hear someone called a “visionary director” it means that they’ve never done anything else you’d give a shit about or have never directed anything else whatsoever. As a result, it feels like an amateur effort of sorts in that there’s nothing all that special about it that would compel you to recommend it to others at the risk of being openly laughed at.

Bradley Cooper is in it as the photographer and he’s fine. Again, nothing special. The story is there but it’s not going to make anyone think twice about swiping their MetroCard, and it’s not all that scary either. It’s pretty gory and violent, but since it’s not all that believable, it doesn’t really carry the desired effect of making you cringe. More just makes you smirk and think, “Well, that was gross.”

But the highlight here is good ol’ Vinnie Jones as Mahogany, the meat train serial killer. The dude only has one line in the entire movie, but since he’s Vinnie Jones, all he really needs to do as look at you sideways to remind you that he’s one mean lookin’ mofo. Along with Clive Barker being behind it, Mahogany is probably the biggest selling point to The Midnight Meat Train. I really don’t understand how his career didn’t take off the way Jason Statham’s did after Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, I’m shocked he hasn’t really hit it big since then. Eh, what can you do.

So, yeah, if for some reason you come across The Midnight Meat Train on TV or have a Clive Barker jones going at the moment, I’d say give it a look. Otherwise, just move it along, folks. Go check out Hellraiser instead.