Book to Movie: The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

Book to Movie: The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
Screenplay by Jeff Buhler
Directed by Ryuhui Kitamura
Based on the short story, The Midnight Meat Train from the collection, Books of Blood, Vol. 1 by Clive Barker

The story title sounds graphic and the short story met that expectation. The essence of the Barker story is in the movie, but the characters are quite different and the resolution quite different. Instead of an accountant reading the newspaper articles about a killer butchering New York subway commuters, we have a photographer who stumbles into the messy affair.

Leon (played by Bradley Cooper) is a photographer aspiring to make it big as an art photographer. He tells a boutique owner he wants to “capture the heart of the city,” and spends his nights capturing the gritty side of New York life. One night, he comes across several young men preparing to rape a young model on the escalators in the subway. He photographs them and points out that if they hurt or kill him, it will all be recorded on a video camera just over his head. The men flee and the woman boards the train. Leon photographs her getting on the train.

The next day, he reads that a model has gone missing in the city. He sees the picture and recognizes the model as the woman he saved the night before. He develops his prints and notices a man wearing a distinctive ring in the photo. He is confident that ring is a clue and takes his photographs to a detective who examines them and is suspicious of Leon, thinking he may have created the photos for the purpose of becoming famous.

Meanwhile, a real life butcher of humans is stalking the city. His name is Mahogany (played quite well by hulking British actor, Vinnie Jones) and he is as methodical as a surgeon in his work. He boards a certain train when he is on the hunt. That train, as we find out, is quite special. He then waits until there is just one person in the car with him. He then takes a large meat tenderizer and bashes their skull in. He hangs the body from the commuter handles and proceeds to prepare the meat for his masters’ repast. The train’s engineer is a most obliging fellow. Not only does he take the train to Mahogany’s destination, he’s quick to help out with a bullet when the situation gets out of hand.

Rebuffed by the police, Leon starts stalking the city at night, hoping to find the butcher – much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Maya, who just wants him to concentrate on his art photography. He boards a train and waits. Eventually, he falls asleep, but awakens to the sound of people being bludgeoned. He sees people hung up on hooks and being butchered. He is attacked by the butcher and is knocked unconscious. He awakens in an abandoned subway station. Carved into the skin on his chest are runes he doesn’t understand.

Leon walks up the stairs from the mysterious subway platform and finds himself in a meat packing plant. It’s the meat packing plant where Mahogany works.

Leon does a little historical research in the newspaper archives and finds that there have been hundreds of people reported missing on the New York commuter trains since their original construction. He’s convinced this killer is ancient.

Mahogany is ancient, but he is wearing down and the years are beginning to show. We see Mahogany alone in his apartment, examining his chest. Pustules are growing on his chest and his skin is deteriorating. He carefully removes these pustules and saves them in jars of preservative.

Leon sets out to stalk the New York subways in pursuit of the killer. Wanting to bring the matter to a close, Maya and her friend, Jurgis, decide to break into the killer’s apartment (found through examining Leon’s photos) to gather evidence. There, they find train timetables dating back to the early 20th century with several trains circled in red. As they are gathering their evidence, Mahogany comes home. Maya escapes, but Jurgis is trapped.

Maya goes to the same detective that Leon talked to earlier and presents her evidence. The detective is dubious and directs Maya to take the train home and forget about it. As Maya leaves to board the train, the detective gives a knowing look. She’s in on it just like the subway conductor.

Maya board the train and finds the midnight meat train’s storage car. There, she meets Mahogany and learns that Jurgis has been hung up like a side of beef. Leon enters the car not knowing Maya is there. He attacks the much larger Mahogany. But Mahogany is old and not a physical match for Leon. Leon throws Mahogany from the train as it comes to a stop.

The subway platform at the end of the line for the midnight meat train is littered with bones. Maya and Leon look out with horror when the engineer enters the car and tells them to accompany him off the train and away from the meat. They exit to the platform. There, Mahogany makes one last attempt on Leon before Leon stabs him with a pointed bone. With his dying breath, Mahogany utters, “welcome.”

As this unfolds, dozens of zombie like creatures enter the station and board the train where they attack the meat with gusto. As they dine, the conductor explains that these subhuman underground dwellers are an ancient race who have always dwelt beneath the ground and beneath the city. The butcher and the meat train serve to feed them to “keep the worlds separate.” The engineer then reaches inside Leon’s mouth and pulls out his tongue while Maya screams in horror. The engineer then eats the tongue.

The engineer then grabs Maya and forces her onto a makeshift altar made of bones. He reaches inside her chest and rips her still-beating heart out of her and looks at it lovingly before eating it. He then tells Leon he’s to be the new butcher.

The movie ends with the detective handing the train schedules she received from Maya to Leon. He’s about to get on with his life’s work.

While the short story was clever with a bit of sleight of hand coming from Barker, this was not a well made film and the screenplay had many deficiencies. The most glaring was the resolution – who got the meat.

In Barker’s story, it was the old, distinguished people of New York who fed on the human flesh. In return, those ancients of Metropolis gave life and vitality to the city. That is an intelligent, thought provoking resolution. The screenplay dumbed it way down to some sort of cross between a zombie and a reptile. It wasn’t even really a mystery since there weren’t any real clues offered as to why the butcher was doing what he was doing.

It also suffered from poorly developed characters. Mahogany was well developed with his silent and exceptionally meticulous habits. The sharp contrast between the man who fussed over every detail of his perfectly tailored suits and the man who bludgeoned people as blood splattered all over him was effective.

We got enough development of Leon to know the guy wanted to be a great photographer. Maya and her friend Jurgis got virtually no development. We didn’t care when they died. In what was supposed to be the climax of the movie, we watched as people we didn’t care about died while a director and screenwriter insulted our intelligence with a dumbed down ending. Tack on the cliché of the still beating heart and its all rather anti-climatic.

The marks on Leon’s chest were never explained. The director hints that perhaps Leon may be undergoing some sort of metamorphosis when they show us a love scene between Leon and Maya when Maya is shocked at how rough Leon is with her. The mysterious ring and its symbol are never explained. Not everything in a movie needs to be explained, but when they are offered up as clues, they must be explained.

I’ll give the director credit for not making the movie an exercise in gore. It is violent. It is bloody. But it is not gratuitous and the movie, while not very good, does not rely on the gore factor to carry it. Though they came up short, the writer and director tried to have the story carry the movie.

The movie was a bomb in the theaters, grossing short of $4 million while costing $15 million to make. The title no doubt hurt it because that title just screams guts and gore. A new title would not have saved this film however. While I’d not call it awful, it certainly was not a good film and not worth visiting more than once.

Books of Blood Volume One By Clive Barker

Books of Blood
Volume One
By Clive Barker
Copyright 1983

Introduction
Horror writer Ramsey Campbell introduces us to Clive Barker and his writing. Campbell promises us violence and sex. He promises disturbing imagery. He promises horrible villains and ghastly creatures. He also promises us soaring and lofty prose flowing from the pen of a man who knows how to write the English language and how to craft a good story.

The Book of Blood
Much as Ray Bradbury set the stage for his collection of tales in the Illustrated Man, Barker introduces a “narrated man.” A fake medium sits in the upstairs bedroom of an allegedly haunted house. The young man claims he can conger the dead to come to him and write their stories on the wall of the room. All over the room are messages from the obscure dead and dead celebrities. On the floor below is the paranormal researcher who has hired him and now knows he’s a fake. But one evening, the dead do arrive and do inscribe their tale. They inscribe it in the flesh of the fake medium. When the dead are done with him, their narratives are etched into his flesh. The paranormal investigator is going to read and research each of those narratives for this book.

It is a bit of a rip off of Bradbury, but still an affective device for setting up his stories. Very early in the book, we see that Barker has a flourish for setting a scene. He’s not as hung up on the straight narrative as writers such as Stephen King and Bradbury. He is a great mood setter with a taste for fanciful use of the language. The opening story primes the pump for what I hope will be a great book of tales.

The Midnight Meat Train
There’s a butcher loose in New York City and he’s carving up human flesh and hanging it on hooks in New York’s subways. One evening, an accountant on his way home from working late falls asleep on the train. He awakens to find himself in the presence of the butcher’s latest victims. He cowers in fear to the end of the line where he finds a previously secret subway station inhabited by some of the oldest and best families of New York City for whom the repast has been carved.

Not an especially new take on the cannibalism story, but entertaining nonetheless. Barker’s narrative has us wondering if our accountant and the butcher are one in the same. In the end, we find out what keeps New York alive and fresh through the centuries.

The Midnight Meat Train was made into a movie in 2008

The Yattering and Jack
A minor demon is assigned by the overlords of Hell to torment a man to drive him to do evil. The demon is frustrated because no matter what mental anguish he inflicts upon the man, he blows off the misfortune and goes about his mundane life. The demon doesn’t know that the man is aware of the game afoot and the man gets the demon to sacrifice his “soul” to accomplish his mission.

This story had a comedic bent to it and was mildly entertaining. It’s not the usual violent, emotionally turbulent stuff Barker is known for.

Pigs Blood Blues
A retired policeman starts work as a shop teacher at a British reformatory for boys. One mousy boy tells the teacher that one of the inmates who reportedly escaped, is still on the grounds and talks to him at night. This poor boy is the target of other inmates who beat him and subject him to verbal and mental abuse, so the retired cop initially dismisses the story. However, when he visits the school’s farm, he meets a most unusual pig – and the true master of the school.

Pigs, with their cloven hooves, are often symbols of evil in horror. Witness poor Carrie as she is doused in pig’s blood by her tormenters. Barker’s pig is larger than life; an unholy embodiment of torture, hatred, and abuse. This was a great story that requires careful and close reading to get the point of the narrative.

Sex, Death, and Starshine
A director is putting on a Shakespeare production in a dilapidated theater. His star is a no talent soap opera refugee, but he’s involved with her sexually, so he’s keeping her. The rest of his cast is uninspired and the theater owner plans to demolish the theater after the play. One evening, after a particularly abysmal dressed rehearsal, he is visited by an odd theater enthusiast who has a new leading lady in mind. Only problem is, she’s dead. But the show must go on and it does with a dead actress leading the way. All her dead friends are there for her curtain call.

This story had a real gothic flavor to it although it was set in modern times. At times, the writing was a bit raunchy, but not over the top. Frequent point of view shifts were sometimes confusing, but otherwise, this was the best story in the book.

In the Hills, the Cities
Two gay men are on romantic holiday in Yugoslavia when they get lost on rural roads. They hear in the distance an incredible thunder rippling across the ground. They arrive in a clearing to find the carnage of thousands of men, women and children with a man putting the wounded out of their misery. They have come across the once a decade battle between two Slavic cities. Only the people of these cities have found a most inventive means of engaging each other. They fight as “one.”

Wow! What an incredibly inventive concept! People of a town serving as body parts of a much larger being with a singular intelligence and will doing battle with similar people of a similar construct. This well paced story never let up. We go from the tedium of bickering between lovers to the race against the plodding beast bent on destruction. Absolutely brilliant!

This book launched Clive Barker as a writer and attracted the attention of greats like Campbell and King. Barker would go on to publish five more Books of Blood as well as several horror and fantasy novels.