I have to admit…I’ve never liked Clive Barker movies much. Historically, I’ve found them incomprehensible, gore-soaked pieces of garbage that didn’t deserve to exist. From my earliest horror days, I counted the Hellraiser series as a test of endurance—how much bloodstained misery could I take before jamming my finger on the eject button in frustration and getting out of it entirely? Turns out, I could take a lot.
But then…then I got my hands on a copy of Midnight Meat Train—you know, that lesser-known, even lesser-seen movie that most horror fans are still venting their collective spleen over? And I began to wonder, was this it? Was this the exception that proved the rule? Was this, heaven help me, a GOOD Clive Barker movie?
More on that directly, but first, the plot: It’s basically about a photographer chasing what he believes to be a butcher who happens to be, in his off hours, an immortal serial killer who’s been hard at work for the last hundred years or more. No one’s ever found that out, of course, because this immortal serial killer butcher is functioning as a delivery service for a race of humanoid creatures that just love the taste of people. The immortal serial killer butcher, who goes by the name of Mahogany, renders his victims into usable cuts which are offloaded on a regular basis, and all on a subway car.
Interestingly—and actually, par for the course for Barker work—no authority figures believe this, and a surprisingly large percentage of them are in on it. Can you imagine the kind of collusion involved in having a hundred years’ worth of murders on a subway car, the meat vanishing into the gullets of Torgo and the rest of the CHUDs, and absolutely NO ONE getting arrested, or even questioned?
See, yeah—again, it makes NO sense at all. How, exactly, does suck turn into awesome?
Two words: Ryuhei Kitamura.
This is the guy who produced Battlefield Baseball. He directed Godzilla: Final Wars. His pedigree is absolutely astonishing. His work is jaw dropping. If anyone, ANYONE, could turn a sow’s ear like a Clive Barker craptacular and turn it into a silk purse like Midnight Meat Train turned out to be…it’s Ryuhei Kitamura.
I’ve never seen a Clive Barker script executed THIS well. It’s as far beyond anything Barker’s ever done before as anything Stephen King’s ever done. It truly is a GOOD Clive Barker movie, and I’m still amazed that I can say that. The execution is just dazzling—over the top, granted, a hundred times granted—but still dazzling.
Let me put it to you this way: I have NEVER seen anyone hit someone so hard with a hammer that it ejects an eye from the socket. That I know of, anyway—I’ve seen a lot of movies but I absolutely don’t recall seeing anything like that. I also don’t recall the last time I’ve seen a fight scene with quite so much purely lethal energy. Or quite so much fake blood, for that matter. And I really can’t remember the last time I saw so many camera tricks and shots that made my eyes pop.
Say what you will about Midnight Meat Train—and there’s a LOT you could say—it is easily unlike any other Clive Barker movie ever made. And at the same time, it’s EXACTLY like a Clive Barker movie, right down to the fatalistic and depressing final sequence. But it is a ride you will not soon forget, nor will you want to. And in that, it may well be the first GOOD Clive Barker movie.
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