¿Y si nos comemos a Raúl?

It's the lurid deprived world of Hollywood. Paul Bland (Paul Bartel) is a liquor store clerk in a bad neighborhood but he has gourmet tastes. His wife Mary (Mary Woronov) is a nurse. Their rent is getting raised and they are low on cash. They hate their swinging noisy neighbors. When one of them tries to rape Mary, Paul kills him with a frying pan and steals his money. After another kill, they decide to advertise to lure more swingers. Thief Raoul Mendoza (Robert Beltran) breaks in and discovers a dead body. He proposes to join the Blands with them keeping the money and him keeping the bodies.

It's weird and ridiculous deadpan humor. It's also fun. Bartel and Woronov are a great couple. It has a few big laughs but it is generally a lot of sly silly comedic takes. It is definitely unique.

With filmmakers so cynical and despairing today about America, it's refreshing to see a film with so much faith in the American dream. This is a classic tale of rags to riches, of a respectable married couple, down on their financial luck, who, with initiative and a novel idea, manage to fulfil their dream, a hotel in the country. If, to get there, they must pose as bondage merchants, murder their clients, rob their wallets, give the bodies to a petty thief who sells them to dog-food companies as choice meat, than such is the nature of success.

RAOUL declares itself as a true story from the Sodom and Gomorrhah of Hollywood, where fantastic wealth co-exists with degrading poverty. The film is a moral tale, about steering the middle-course, about what it takes to be normal and decent. It plays like straight John Waters, but just as hysterical, even if, eventually, it cannot sustain itself.

The featured couple are called, appropriately, the Blands, and it is significant that their serial-killing weopon is a lethal frying-pan. Paul, played by the director, is the epitome of his name: balding, pedanctic, so obsessed with fine wines that he gets fired from his low-rent off-licence for over-ambition. His wife, Mary, is less bland, which is why she is more easily tempted by the dark side. While Paul remains sweetly virginal, she, a hospital nutritionist, works in an evnironment where she is continually harrassed by lecherous lotharios, and is knowledgeable enough to know that the most humiliating revenge is to have them receive their enema from a burly dandy.

Bartel is a Roger Corman alumnus, and this can be seen in the fluid, economical filming, the functional set-ups that are actually quite complex. The film's very classical structure is at odds with (piecemeal) filming that has characters seem, ineptly, to wander up to the camera, although this has the unsettling effect of making the creepy nonsense seem curiously real.

There is also a hint of suppressed Gothic in the telling - Mary's hysterical normality is so camp she could be Vampira - while the Blands' blandness is under attack from all sides. It's bad enough to have 'swingers' (a charmingly 50s word for perverts that chimes with the Blands' adorably tasteless 50s furniture left them by Mary's mother until she dies) crowding the tenement for sleazy, Warholian, sado-masochistic parties, but to have one of them storm into your apartment, throw up all over your carpet, nearly die in your lavatory, bring your husband to the party to be humiliated/initiated by Doris the Dominatrix, and then come back to violate your wife, is an imposition.

The film makes satirical points enough - the rich and professional classes are all vile, violent sleazes, while the S&M 'sickos' are sweet, loving mothers who live in pleasant suburban avenues so indifferent to capitalist Darwinism that they help out the competition. The racism needed to keep normality normal is shown in the horrifyingly hilarious shooting of a store-robber, or in the final fate of self-confessed 'Chicano' Raoul, which suggest Peter Greenaway might be a fan of the film. The cannibalism theme has a long satirical history in jibes on the bourgeoisie, and it's no surprise to learn that Bartel is a devotee of Bunuel.

But the film's real satire is to show how normality must survive in a society, Hollywood, that has obliterated any recognised sense of reality.

One of the greatest comedies ever made (right up there with National Lampoon's Vacation, Caddyshack, Dumb and Dumber, and Clerks) that really makes a strong statement about swingers, s&m, rape, murder, and cannibalism without becoming tasteless. This is Bartel's greatest accomplishment. A major cult hit and deservingly so.

* * * *

The late Paul Bartel made several interesting and overlooked cult movies in his sadly too short career, including his exploitation classic collaboration with the legendary Roger Corman 'Death Race 2000', but of all his movies he will be remembered for this one, 'Eating Raoul', a minor masterpiece. Shot on a shoe string budget as a real labor of love it is still one of the most entertaining black comedies ever made. Bartel himself co-stars with the tasty Mary Woronov (Warhol's 'Chelsea Girls'), who he had previously acted with in the wonderful romp 'Rock'n'Roll High School' among other things. They show lots of on screen chemistry and make a delightful team, something they obviously realized themselves as they went on to work together several times after this. However they were never better together than in this movie as the uptight but sweet Blands. The Blands have ambitions to open up their own restaurant but have limited means at their disposal. By accident they stumble across a way to get the cash they need using swingers whom they detest. All goes to plan until they encounter the shady locksmith Raoul (Robert Beltran, best known now to Trekkers worldwide). Things then start to get a little more complicated. The three actors seem to love working together and this gives the movie an added zest. The script in witty and unpredictable, and there are some funny bits from the supporting cast, especially Pee-wee Herman sidekick John Paragon as a pushy sex store clerk, and Ed Begley, Jr ('Meet The Applegates') as a horny hippie. This is a wonderful movie, a real comedy gem, that I highly recommend. Paul Bartel R.I.P.

Lengthy description to describe a movie that runs less than 90 minutes, but wow, can't say I've ever seen anything quite like it. I'm sure plenty of people would find this movie dull, as it moves at a snail's pace. It is early 80s B-movie schlock, which is exactly what I liked about it. What's there not to like about a couple with zero sex drive that decides, right after killing a few people, to make their money by advertising sexual fantasies, sexually enticing people, then whacking them with a frying pan before enthusiastically emptying their wallets.

I wanted to see this movie because I knew Paul Bartel was a cult flick God, having seen his master cheese flick Death Race 2000 and his rebellious teacher role in Rock N Roll High School. Shabby dialog throughout, awful (but wonderfully so) dubbing, don't watch this movie to add points on your IQ test. The pace is rather slow throughout, yet Eating Raoul is also goofy and surrealistic. The over the top sexual innuendos and rampant sexual scenes are countered by the bizarre calmness of Mary and Paul Bland (Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel, respectively) as they take care of victim after victim. Not really a laugh out loud movie (except for the botched robbery scene and the hot tub sequence, they were freakin funny) but it will make you chuckle.

One thing that was great about this movie is that even though it was obviously an 80s cult flick, the music was, for the most part, great. It gave a cartoonish feel to large portions of the movie and added atmosphere to the strangeness that permeated throughout. The hammy manner in which the murders take place also adds to the offbeat feel of this film as there is no emphasis on violence and blood. No gruesomeness needed, for if the frying pan does the job, why not use it?

I would recommend this flick to cult movie fans but it's a lot more off kilter than anything you've ever seen. I found much of the humor to be delectably inane, and even though the pace was slow, I had a good time watching this Paul Bartel vehicle. Roles by Buck Henry, Ed Begley Jr and Don Steele (you know, the DJ guy from Rock N Roll High School and Death Race 2000) add to the zaniness of a flick that rightly could offend many but could also be found endlessly amusing, as I did.