Film Review - The Midnight Meat Train

-

(Again, allow for the time between this being written and resurrected for this blog)

Leon Kaufmann is a struggling photographer - determined to make it big without selling out. He prowls night-time New York in search of the iconic image of the city's dark side that could make him a household name.

A chance encounter on a subway station platform with a well dressed, but hard-faced, man sparks an obsession in Kaufmann. He pursues the man, believing him responsible for series of disappearances from late night trains. His paranoia about the man is well founded. Mahogany (the well-dressed man) commits the most brutal of acts on the subway, beating his victims to death and then butchering them.

Ex-soccer player Vinnie Jones is perfect as Mahogany. He has the perfect look for a deranged serial killer. But it's the focus on Kaufmann (Bradley Cooper) that makes the film work. Cooper plays the progression from career-desperation into obsession about the subway killer wonderfully.

This is a film for the Saw fan, rather than the fan of psychological scares or Freddy-style total gorefest. It's not going to unnerve you; suspense isn't on the cards. And although there's considerable violence here (it gets very bloody at times) it's not relentless. There's more too it - a fairly good plot for one thing, including a decent amount of intrigue. (How many people are involved in this?)

It's a good film, no doubt about it. But it could have been better. More should have been made of the reasons why it's all happening. The reveal at the end answers some but not all of your questions. There are also issues concerning Mahogany that are left hanging (his medical condition for one). You reach the end of the movie with several things unexplained and it's frustrating.

These are minor gripes only though - this film has a lot to recommend it. Watch it - you could do a lot worse!

Director: Ryuhei Kitamura

Actors: Bradley Cooper, Vinnie Jones, Leslie Bibb, Brooke Shields, Roger Bart

Label: Lions Gate

Length: 100 minutes

DVD Release: February 2009

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Ray Garton - Bestial

-
In horror movie-land sequels are pretty much a par for the course. You make a good horror film, it seems it only makes sense to go back and milk the idea a second time. In the world of horror books (note - not dark fantasy or paranormal romance, I mean HORROR) this has been less common. I'm not saying they don't exist - Graham Masterton's Manitou and James Herbert's Rats both started series - and sure you get books set in a repeated environs - take Gary Braunbeck's Cedar Hill short stories and novels, and Stephen King's version of Maine. But straight sequels, picking up the action from the end of the prior book or soon after, haven't filled the shelves in bookstores. I guess part of the reason for this is the rather final end that most horror books have. Zombies are destroyed, vampires staked, demons exorcised, witches burned etc, etc. Okay, Dracula can be resurrected over and over but mostly you get to the end and that's it. Recently though this seems ...
Read more

Review of Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: The World as a Stage

-
Although best known for his travel books this is far from Bryson's first venture into other fields. He has written the obligatory (for a writer) book of personal memoirs ("The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid"), a book or two on the English language ("Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words") and even one on the sum total of human knowledge ("A Short History of Nearly Everything"). And now he has turned his hand to biography with this book on the greatest of all authors. This feels remarkably well researched - despite being such a short book he lists three and a half pages of selected bibliography. This amount of available research material does not mean, however, that much is actually known about Shakespeare life - far from it. Bryson even makes fun of this fact throughout the book. The book explains the few known facts of Shakespeare's life and how they are known - his birth (or rather his baptism, the exact date of his birth being infe...
Read more

A long time passed

-
I've not posted on here for quite some time - a little over a year. In truth I was not sure I was ever going to post on this blog again. As anyone knows who read my post from April last year I was diagnosed with depression and my personality changed a little. I stopped reading completely and cut back severely on my watching sf or horror. I just didn't have the interest. Well it's now more than 16 months since my diagnosis and I've still not read any fiction. I did start reading again although it's been non-fiction only. I've read my way through a number of science books including a great biography of Joseph Priestley, a fair few history books with the current one being a general all-encompassing history of Germany. Oh, and two great books by Simon Winchester. Screenwise I've watched little sf/horror, although seem to be working my way through Nordic Noir - a list of Crime films / TV series made in Scandanavia. (By the way, anyone who enjoys a goo...
Read more