When I first read the synopsis for Danny Mulheron’s upcoming horror/comedy Fresh Meat, I was intrigued and excited. I had never seen a New Zealand horror/comedy and thought the idea of criminals taking a group of unsuspecting cannibals hostage was a fantastic idea. After I saw the trailer though I became skeptical of the film and didn’t think it was going to be nearly as entertaining as it could have been. After watching the film my film intuition proved correct.
When a trio of criminals breaks their angry overweight friend out of a police transport vehicle, they take refuge in a seemingly innocent suburban house, taking the recently reunited family hostage while they try to avoid the cops. What the criminals don’t know, and what the daughter in the family is about to find out, is that the parents and son are recently converted cannibals, following the teachings of the Solomon Smith. Eventually things begin to spiral out of control as the true nature of the family is revealed, the daughter Rina (Hanna Tevita) starts to fall for the tough female of the gang, Gigi (Kate Elliot), and the police begin to close in on their location.
Fresh Meat was a waste of not only a fantastic idea that could be utilized in just the horror realm or the comedic horror realm, but it was also a waste of 92 minutes of my life. I was really pulling for it but when a guy who has a pretty broad and immature sense of humor can only laugh at one scene in the film, you know there is something seriously wrong and I don’t think it’s a cultural “lost in translation” type of thing.
The jokes were all immature, contrived and unoriginal. Most of the humor was physical and the type of physical we’ve seen in regular PG rated comedies over and over (I laughed more during The Three Stooges remake). None of the humor relied on any wit which made the dialogue uninteresting. I could care less what happened in the movie, the only thing that stimulated my perverted mind, and I’m sure the mind of countless others, were the lesbian scenes. The best part of the movie was the opening scene because it started out with lesbians washing each other in the shower. Briar Grace-Smith uses the sexiness of the two females to keep us interested in an otherwise uninteresting film, a c
heap but successful tactic.
Additionally, there are some serious continuity issues throughout the film. I don’t normally pick up on these things but there is a scene in which Gigi has a shotgun and doesn’t have any ammo in it leading to a fight with a cop but she somehow magically produces a shotgun shell later in the fight to kill him. Now if you look at the poster above, Gigi is the one in the pink and I ask you, where the hell is she’s going fit a shotgun shell to reload her gun? I only bring this up because it’s kind of a big deal when you kill a cop.
Furthermore, the acting just wasn’t up to par. Everything felt too over the top and forced. Occasionally the over the top performances worked, but that’s isolated to Temuera Morrison who played Hemi as he killed it when he went cannibalistic crazy, but unfortunately nothing felt natural about the rest of the cast’s delivery (maybe it was the accents). I can’t blame the actors completely as they had to work with a pretty bad script but still, even talented actors can give good performances in crappy films.
Overall, I’d save your money and wait until Fresh Meat hits Netflix or some other home video channel. It isn’t worth the money and I doubt even being in a midnight crowd will help make the experience of screening this film that much more fun.
Rating: A fantastic idea that was poorly executed and ruined by its childlike sense of humor (3.4/10)
Recent Comments