I hate the subways, I’ve always hated the subways; they’re dark, dank, merciless and filled with running machines that you can’t control thus you are immediately trapped if you find yourself on the wrong pod in the middle of the night. What if it stops mid tunnel? Will it go? Will it ever keep running? How far does the rabbit hole go, and what’s in these holes we’ve never explored? That’s the questions posed in “Midnight Meat Train,” Ryuhei Kitamura’s tale of a subway serial killer that have been somewhat of an anomaly in the horror world. It’s one that many have desired to see but few have been able to, and I’m glad to say that it’s well worth the wait many of us are enduring that may go on for another year or so. Who knows when the masses will be able to see it, if at all?
“Midnight Meat Train” is the movie in the grand tradition of the rising bathysiderodromophobia (that’s fear of subways to you gals and gents) sub-genre that doesn’t quite convince us we’re watching the New York Underground, but does well in insisting that we don’t explore what lies beneath and step in to the wrong tube. In doing so, director Kitamura also examines the loss of humanity through profession that both our protagonist and antagonist practice and what it means for them to engage in what they define as hobbies that slowly eat away at their souls. The title is not just a definition of the premise, but a metaphor for how our characters view their world with humans only viewed as piles of meat and subjects for enduring torture and mayhem that’s inflicted on by the photographer Leon.
The slasher Mahogany treats his trains like his slaughter houses, each their own easily cleaned waste floors and mindless corpses to be extinguished in moment’s notice. Who Is Mahogany, and more to the point what is his purpose in the subways? What happens when a photographer becomes too empathic with his subject; does he draw a further distance or form a symbiotic relationship with it? Insofar does the subject crave the need for the watcher’s attentions and eventually become a single organism? Not even the youngest Hollywood hack who fancies himself a grue meister could capture what director Kitamura does in dichotomy and undertone with his stark pale reds and hardly definable difference between the human animal and the slaughtered animal while concurrently paying homage to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
The performances are truly immaculate with Vinnie Jones giving a brilliant performance filled with only one line of dialogue, while Bradley Cooper is fantastic as the man whose subject becomes his reason for being before he can even realize it. Though many a pre-manufactured cult classics usually share their hype to never really pay it off (ahem—Hatchet), I believe “Midnight Meat Train” is destined to be a cult classic as a vicious, brilliant, and disgusting horror film with the right amount of ambiguity that will keep you watching breathlessly for ninety minutes. I wish I could have seen it sooner and sadly I wish this film would reach a wider audience than it will when it comes to DVD someday here in the US only to be relegated as a direct to television movie. “Midnight Meat Train” is a vicious slasher with great performances and a second half that will stick in your brain for days after watching.