Ryûhei Kitamura Reflects on ‘The Midnight Meat Train’

Looking over an older report at Bloody Disgusting, director Ryûhei Kitamura talked to fellow filmmaker Mick Garris about the horrible mistreatment of his American film debut, The Midnight Meat Train on the podcast Post Mortem. I’m sure of lot of listeners know that the film was literally dumped into a very small number theaters by the distributor Lionsgate because of a regime change at the company.

Kitamura had this to say about the situation:

“It was very heartbreaking because it was my first American movie. And I was very proud of the movie,” Kitamura told Garris. “And the last I heard was, ya know, they got so excited and they even set a release date. I still remember… 2008… May 16th. That’s a very good day. Hot summer day. They were confident with the movie. And they released the trailer… I still remember, when I went to Arclight Cinema to see Rambo 4, the trailer was there. I was like, ‘WOW.’ And then… all this craziness happens.”

I remember feeling bad for Kitamura when all of this was going on. Horror fans did try to help Clive Barker in an effort to get the film released to theaters by letting Lionsgate head (at the time) Joe Drake know that their was a hungry audience that wanted to experience this on the big screen. Of course, Drake could’ve cared less. Luckily, the film would eventually find an audience when it was released on home video. I still wish I could’ve seen Mahogany slicing and dicing on the big screen to this day.

To read the rest of the article and listen to the podcast follow the links below:

Director Ryûhei Kitamura Reflects on Lionsgate’s Burial of ‘Midnight Meat Train’

http://postmortempodcast.libsyn.com/episode-26

Thanks to Bloody Disgusting and Mick Garris