Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Fun with meat tenderizers

Today I watched Midnight Meat Train, a horror movie based on a short story by Clive Barker and starring a guy I think I saw on Alias, Popular cutie Leslie Bibb and the hilariously brutal Vinnie Jones, and I liked it quite a bit. Leon is some sort of starving vegan artist who thinks that pointing a camera at stuff, like, say, a bum on the subway, and then clicking the little red button on top counts as art. As long as he maintains his starving status he's not going to bestow a ball-and-chain status on his girlfriend, and so the wily wench goes around his back and sets up an appointment for him with Brooke Shields, who I guess owns some kind of important art gallery that specializes in fancy overpriced crap. Unfortunately, Ms. Shields isn't too impressed with Leon's bum-on-the-subway schtick, so she just tells him to try harder and sends him on his way. While trying to produce work of greater complexity he runs across a group of wholesome young boys on the subway as they try to rob and/or rape and/or kill a cute Asian chick. Being the dashing warm-blooded American that he is Leon obviously saves the day and rescues the frightfully distressed damsel, but the next morning he reads in the paper that the hot little Asian number was actually a quasi-famous fashion model and that she's gone missing, which means that he was probably the last person to see her alive before she got on the train. His informal investigation into the matter as a professional camera creep leads him to this big butcher guy who cuts up dead cows in a factory during the day and smashes human skulls with a big meat tenderizer on the subway at night. Now, I know all that makes this movie sound like your run-of-the-mill slasher film, but I was very pleasantly surprised with how it turned out in the end. Sure, I didn't give a crap about the whole photography angle and the boring relationship between the two leads, not even during the awkwardly violent love making scene. Well, maybe a little. My point is that it didn't matter at all, not once the gory awesomness of killing people on the train with butcher tools kicked in. The CGI effects look pretty cartoony, like a shot in which Sam Raimi's kid brother gets both his eyeballs knocked out of his skull, but most of the effects are practical, and those are absolutely magnificent, with all sorts of interesting tools going through all kinds of interesting body parts, and just loads and loads of delicious, slippery blood that, when covering the floor of a train car, can turn even the most dire situation into a moment of satisfying slapstick comedy. There's this one part that shows you how to prepare a human corpse for future consumption, including the removal of the eyes, teeth, hair and fingernails in vivid graphic detail, which I found to be exceptionally cool, not to mention extremely helpful for us aspiring future serial killers. And I dare anyone to try and make any sort of sense of this scene where the big butcher dude slices these big ugly warts off his chest and keeps them in little jars behind the bathroom mirror! The movie's final scenes brought me exactly what I was hoping for, transforming it from what could be a straightforward slasher film into something that is truly unique. I've always adored underground railways, and I'm happy to say that I now have one more reason feel this way.


Leslie Bibb needs to eat something. Nice Bibbs though!

Today I also finished watching the first season of Important Things with Demetri Martin, and it was absolutely hilarious. I really like Demetri Martin, and if I were into dudes I'd totally save my cherry for him, despite the fact that in that particular alternate universe I'm more into older gentlemen. Some of the sketches were kinda lame, but nothing is funnier than the combination of Demetri and an extra large pad. Hmm. I just googled "large pad" and got four different videos of Demetri Martin. I guess that makes some kind of sense that somehow escapes me at the moment. Anyway, the second season started last month, so I have some catching up to do. Yay!

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