REELGUYS mini-RETRO REVIEW:
Midnight Meat Train takes the wrong turn
Maine connection(new feature): Our trains stay above ground, thank you very much, and our butchers are much less intimidating (some even talk).
Based on a Clive Barker short story, the viewer knows from the title and the writer that the film is likely gruesome and gory with a supernatural twist lurking in the background. It isn't enough for a murderous butcher to be riding the night train and slaughtering the unhappy last commuters of the evening; there must be more to the story. The eventual sci-fi twist does not work as well as it did in Barker's more famous "Hellraiser" film adaptation. Perhaps if the clues had led to this ending more seamlessly it would not have been as jarring for the run-of-the-mill horror enthusiast. Surprisingly, the rest of the film is not as overdone as one would have expected but there are just too many times when characters do exactly the wrong thing simply to further the plot. These bad decisions become hard to explain, leading the viewer to a "if they’re going to be that stupid, they deserve what they get" mindset. Not the best place for a horror fan to be.
The newly popular Bradley Cooper ("The Hangover") stars in "Midnight Meat Train" as a fledgling photographer trying to capture the dark underbelly of New York. He finds it when he begins following a scary-looking subway rider named Mahogany (Vinnie Jones; "X-Men: The Last Stand") who may be implicated in a series of murders. His girlfriend, Maya (Leslie Bibb; "Iron Man"), tries to bring her photographer boyfriend back from the darkness that has consumed him. There are a few legitimate scares in the course of the movie and plenty of "eww. . . gross" moments but nothing particularly haunting. Jones works as the silent but deadly butcher and a battle on the subway between photographer and Mahogany makes for an interesting finale. If the picture had simply stopped there, perhaps I would be more generous with my final score. And I hate computer-animated blood; give me red paint anytime over that mess.
Rated R for sequences of strong bloody gruesome violence, grisly images involving nudity, sexual content and language.
