midnight meat train

Saw this contemporary horror classic a few weeks ago at the Fantasia Fest in MTL. The word on the street's that due to some internal studio politics the movie got only a very limited release, a fuck-all shame in my opinion. This one garnered much buzz being a Clive Barker bullet, and with sure-handed direction from Asian import Ryuhei Kitamura it didn't disappoint - and actually surpassed my expectations. Kitamura's one of the rare Asian horror imports that didn't implode under the anxiety of cultural turn-over. Though, he did have some issues with capture and pace with the few domestic-related scenes, but gets a mulligan. Midnight Meat Train was a kitsch, moody, gory, technically-adept crowd-pleaser, all the components of a solid post-millennium horror flick. The separation from its inept, manufactured contemporaries lies in its meta.

Firstly, the fact alone that it had exegesis should be applauded in a film. You could say MMT was a riff on Blow-Up, but cultivated from one of the premier exemplars of postmodern manifest, Clive Barker. He asks us: Who is the killer, the actionable party or the voyeur capturing the action? Who is the grander perpetuator, the media who feeds us or us who feed the culture of the media? Who's more perverse, who's the pervert, the criminal? The line's atom-thin between perpetrator and perpetuator. The voyeur becomes what he shoots. His perception of reality suffers and turns into depraved disillusionment.

Though, my only dissatisfaction of MMT was the concluding anti-hero nihilism: that you, in fact, become in the flesh what you shoot, embody it and redemption turns a way of succumbing. I mention "anti-hero" because in a grander postmodern sentiment, Bradley Cooper's character's a guardian of sorts, maintaining the equilibrium of two disjunctive realities from colliding. This, though quintessential artifact of the last whimpers of postmodernity, works as a sterling reminder to our moment that cuts the glossy crust away from manufactured sincerity and aesthetic dismemberment that still pervades.