Bradley Cooper and Vinnie Jones in "The Midnight Meat Train," Lionsgate, 2008

On the other side of my orbitofrontal cortex, the new Clive Barker adaptation "The Midnight Meat Train" (2008) makes perfect sense -- a dreamish parallel American city (Los Angeles, shot to look like any major city except Los Angeles), wherein a walking slaughter-line hammer of doom (the utterly mute Vinnie Jones) rides the underground (the most discomfiting exploration of nighttime subways since "Jacob's Ladder") harvesting unlucky commuters for -- this is vintage Barker, remember -- purposes both conspiratorial and ickily cosmic. The shake 'n' bake mix of talent involved (add in Japanese digi-gore director Ryuhei Kitamura and up-and-comer Bradley Cooper) gives the film a far more professional veneer than you'd expect, given the premise and Kitamura's often outrageously silly splatter set pieces. I liked the ensemble's efforts at textural realism -- Cooper and Leslie Bibb make a convincing couple, especially when she takes his hand when going to sleep and matter-of-factly sticks it between her legs -- and Kitamura even manages a blast of "Blue Velvet"/"Rear Window" homage packed into a single scene.

Despite the CGI blood sprays, which never fail to bore, the movie, like the first "Hellraiser," attains certain painful images that linger -- notably, Gein-ishly, the in-transit subway car converted into a meat locker, naked human corpses hanging from metal "straps"-turned-hooks. But although it is in many ways a trite and overcooked genre mess of the kind I'd be sore to have paid ten bucks to see, the movie made me rethink our never-ending bewitchment with serial killer scenarios -- the thing is, they mean something. Ordinary murders and crimes are fueled by everyday hate, jealousy, greed or even psychosis. But even the least awake of us can sense, as Barker would unquestionably want us to, that the inscrutable swath of a monstrous fictional serial killer is actually standing in for something else, some other larger evil or impenetrable devastation. Its irrational hugeness makes it so. I couldn't guess at what "The Midnight Meat Train" is really all about; I just know there's something there, even if I wouldn't want to lend the movie an unjust dose of props by saying what that could be. Think about the last 20 years or so of serial killers in movies and novels and TV shows, and think about the number of victims, the amount of indecipherable violence -- if it's metaphorical, what are we really afraid of? Not merely a man, who kills for a reason or on impulse. No, it's something bigger, less comprehensible, more ubiquitous. Something more like technology (why are we comfortable with over 30,000 car crash deaths a year?) or industrial commodification (the facts about what we eat and drink without knowing it will, once you're acquainted with them, freeze your blood) or some other ruinous aspect of contemporary life we cannot, or choose not to, control. Could be.

"Moving Midway" (First Run Features) and "The Midnight Meat Train" (Lionsgate) are now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: Elizabeth Cheshire, Charlie Silver, and Abraham Hinton in "Moving Midway," First Run Features, 2007]

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