Evil That Is Hard to Swallow. Bad Meat review!

badmeatNot quite sure I want to review Bad Meat. Analyzing a project that never saw completion is like trying to teach terminally ill 3 year old how to manage a bank account. As I do a little more back ground research on Bad Meat, I’ve come across some very interesting and almost discouraging tidbits about the history behind Bad Meat. First off, the director is named Lulu Jarmen. Right now, you might be asking yourself who the hell is Lulu Jarmen and what else has she directed? Some people think Jarmen took over the project from Rob Schmidt, the director behind the inbred cannibal movie Wrong Turn and who promised fans that Dead Meat would be the most vile move ever seen quoted in 2011. However, many other people believe that Lulu Jarmen is a pseudo-name for Rob Schmidt because of how embarrassedly bad Bad Meat turned out financially and plot-wise.

Six troubled youths are sent to the isolated Camp Hardway under the cruel thumb of an hitler-esque figure and perverse, sadistic counselors. When the camp cook feeds the counselors rotten meat, the counselors transform into raging, flesh eating psychopaths.

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The premise is a shortcoming much like the ending of Dead Meat. Literally, the film just ran out of money from Capital films and immediately shut down production half way through the movie. Is it a good thing that perhaps Schmidt (or Jarmen) shot the movie from first sequence? One would think. Yet, Dead Meat ends right at the middle of the movie and in the midst of an attack none-the-less. The characters’ fates, the six teenage renegades, are left unexplained by an open ended, most likely reshot, ending that has left us to conjure up our own imagination to seek an ending to Dead Meat.

Dead Meat from the beginning had no promise even though fun to watch. The perversity is awkward, the fluids flow in chunky green vomit and think warm red blood, and the dialogue is as colorful as all the spectrums of the rainbow. The first 82-83, give or take, manages to at least make your time worth wild, but the last ten minutes are severely butchered with reshot with scenes of a severely burned (maybe?) survivor of the camp laying in a hospital bed and typing away on a bedside computer. Typing what? Yo no se. Most likely the story behind how this survivor came to be mangled and so horribly disfigured. These scenes, which are interjected into the original film, barely have any connections besides the name of the main character Tyler being thrown about by his apparent older brother who looks old enough to be his father.

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Dead Meat is not the “sickest move you’ll see this year.” Besides, I most likely would not even call it a full film. Intriguing, gross, and hilarious but a grand let down by Jarmen (or by Schmidt, who cares?). Any bit of Dead Meat’s success died with Capitol Films the production company. Revolver Entertainment’s pickup of Dead Meat would have rejuvenated life into this film, but instead arbitrary reshoots baffles and confuse.

Evil Mail Call! From Beyond the Iron Doors to eat Bad Meat with Sexsquatch!

This is what lazy Saturday mornings do to you. Instead of a video or a neat little gif image, I just made a collage in photoshop, but the job gets done.

Bad Meat - From Beyond (Second Sight) - Iron Doors - Sexsquatch

Bad Meat – From Beyond (Second Sight) – Iron Doors – Sexsquatch

You can read my thoughts on Iron Doors here.

I’m thinking Second Sight’s release of From Beyond is next!!!! I’ve seen it before and I have the MGM now OOP version, but I still love the movie and can’t wait to view it again.

Evil Will Lock You Up Forever! Iron Doors review!

IDMVDA young investment banker awakes with a major headache and trapped inside a vault. Having no idea how he landed inside this death trap, he struggles to find a way out before he dies of dehydration or starvation. As he tries to piece together who has an immoral vendetta against him, an escape from the vault leaves him desperate and energy spent while the questions of his mysterious circumstances are almost too much for his mind to bare.

We’ve seen this type of movie before where one or more people wake up to find that they have no idea where they are or how they got there. Iron Doors plays on top of that age old aspect that normally what scares the crap out of people – the unknown. Iron Doors resembles a lot like 1997’s Cube without the traps. Instead, the rooms are filled with different objects that might or might not leave foreboding clues to their whereabouts – such as a coffin and a grave. The idea behind these types of movies, which also include the first two Saw movies and Ryan Reynolds Buried, are giant concepts and yet somehow these filmmakers, including Iron Doors director Stephen Manuel, are able to take the minimalistic routes and produce a thrilling story.

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However, unlike Saw and Cube, Iron Doors ending bares a big disappointment and leaves the audience more questions than answers. I can tell you that the ending left me yearning for more answers, but I guess we have to make our own conclusions and nothing can just be handed to us as a freebie. I hope this won’t spoil too much or if any at all about the movie, but I want to provide my own interpretation of the status on our main character actor Axel Wedekind and his companion actress Rungano Nyoni, an African woman who doesn’t speak a lick of English. I strongly believe the characters are dead and have been stuck in limbo where the duo must be capable to work together, supporting each other to dig, chisel, and survive their way out of the vaults. The clues are this, and I’ve mention these two already, the coffin and the open grave. Two straight forward signs of recent death. Also, when Axel wakes up in his vault, what accompanies him is a maggot infested dead rat and that, again, suggests that death surrounds him. When Axel tries to recall what he was doing before he awoke in the vault, he states that he was out at the bar (he continuously states that he will never drink again) and didn’t know where he left his car suggesting that Axel was very intoxicated and probably crashed his car, killing himself in a DUI incident. Rungano, in subtitles, mentions being from Africa where we know genocide and disease plague most of the un-urbanized parts of the lands. Rungano’s traditional outfit suggests that she leaves in a primitive tribe. A bit of a stretch on my end, I know. Plus, the vault itself is supernatural and every time the characters enter a new room they are confronted by the same four walls and a vault door, but only the objects are different.

The film never really picks up the pace and sometimes the tediousness of the characters’ attempts to escape are captured too long in a scene extending the scene way past it’s prime. Their survival instincts, drinking their own urine, eating maggots, using a discovered oxygen tank for air, are seemingly instinctively smart, but realistically very ill-advised. We can only blame panic on the part of Axel, but opposite Axel, Rungano is calmer and level headed yet she is persuaded by Axel who has been awake three days longer than Rungano. Yet desperation gets the better of her when knowing her existence is near end and breaks down to enjoy compassionate love with a barely alive Axel in what could be their last hours on, what they believe, is their world.

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MVD releases the Germany born and bred English spoken Iron Doors, a suspenseful thriller I would recommend for any fans of Cube or Buried. If you’re claustrophobic, then I’m sorry because you probably will not enjoy this film; you’ll most likely suffocate at the idea of being locked in a small room with a dead rat. Purchase the film at MVD!