Halloween Horrors are here again, with Varied Celluloid covering the latest in Horror cinema and the greatest of old. This month is a tribute to all things of the macabre, with this front page being taken up by horror reviews and thoughts. Check back daily for new reviews, as the rest of this month will be littered with sessions dealing with the obscure and the grotesque! Today we have the more recent Clive Barker/Ryuhei Kitamura production and I’m here to say, it’s pretty friggin’ good. I really enjoyed it a lot, and it shows the growth of Kitamura as a filmmaker as well as how good Barker’s stuff can be when adapted for the screen with a little nerve and originality. Check this one out and queue it for your horror movie marathons on Halloween!
The Review: Hollywood doesn’t exactly have the most stellar track record with their treatment of smaller horror films, they also don’t have the greatest of results when great filmmakers from the East make the travel over to the states. Put the two things together and what do you get? Well, I can tell you nothing that is detrimental to the filmmakers or the quality of this particular film. Unfortunately, the fine (read: moronic) people over at Lions Gate who dumped the film in a little over 100 low end theaters for a quick release before shuffeling it off to what they consider a slow death in the DVD market. However, controversy more often than not brethes life into any and all projects – so I won’t be surprised to see the film do well on the DVD market. Especially after Barker came out in defense of the project and completely bashed Lions Gate and the people responsible for holding the film back, and tried to start an e-mail campaign to get the film it’s true proper theatrical release. It’s unfortunate that they weren’t successful, as I do think The Midnight Meat Train had everything in it to make money and holds a lot of what the horror market could use right now. That is, a good dose of originality and a decent amount of fun and not just the same “torture porn” or “retro horror” that seems to be all the rage these days. The Midnight Meat Train is far from a classic on the same level as a Friday the 13th or Halloween, but if you’re looking for some good old fashioned American horror written by an Englishman and directed my a tremendous Japanese director – The Midnight Meat Train really does deliver.