The movie basically is a gored-up version of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic "Blow-Up" (yes, I am flying the movie geek flag proudly here, aren't I?), which is about a photographer who snaps a picture of a killer leading his victim to her doom and becomes obsessed about it. But what "The Midnight Meat Train" does is sucks all the subtext, characters, and message out of the movie and slaps in its place bland archetype characters (I did like Vinnie Jones, but only because he just has that look of being a terrifying dude) and mindless gore.

I found it amusing that in "Blow-Up" the movie was a critique about watching murder from the camera lens and being a voyeur of evil, much like the audience in the movie theatre watching murders unfold before them; and this movie turns it on its head and revels in displaying gore on the screen. That probably says something about how far our society has come in being inured to violence that it takes the cinematic equivalent of a hippo in the living room for us to notice the violence.

The gore is something else I didn't like. It was way too over the top. I found myself laughing at the deaths, which I really finds destroys a movie's horror potential. There is a line between horror and comedy when it comes to gore, and you can easily cross it by taking the bloodletting to a super high level. It probably says something very dark and terrifying about my psyche, but the scene where Ted Raimi's eyeball is shot out of his skull straight at the camera had me all but rolling on the floor with laughter. The movie has an almost "Evil Dead" level of splatter but without that playfulness of it.

All in all, a very visually appealing movie (but in this day and age, with the right budget, what movie can't be?), but it is ruined by a lackluster story and too much gore for its own good.