Comiendose a Raul

Eating Raoul is so eager to please and never overstays its welcome. Shot for what seems to be $3, it's amazing that the film turns out as nice and polished as it is. Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov play the aptly named Blands. They dream to, one day, start their own eatery, but it seems as if it's just not in the cards for them. After a mix up, they end up accidentally killing a man and, thinking he's a nobody, they take his wallet. At that moment, a brilliant business plan is born and the Blands pose as sexual deviants to lure people to their homes, kill them (with a frying pan) and steal their money. Things get complicated when a young man named Raoul discovers their secret and wants in on their scheme.

The basic concept of Eating Raoul is so damn goofy that it's amazing it works as well as it does, but Bartel and Woronov smartly play everything super straight and it works.

If you consider yourself a dark comedy fan and haven't seen this movie, you need to change that right now.

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.

This movie keeps ending up on my top ten list, no matter how many others come and go with the years. Director Paul Bartel began with a ridiculous premise, and then had everyone play it perfectly straight, which resulted in a comedy that doesn't telegraph its laughs. It's evident that the film was lovingly polished (again) in postproduction, down to the level of tiny incidental sound effects that add immeasurably to the hilarity if you happen to catch them. The story is full of murders, but there's no gore 'n guts here; it's all as discreet as an Agatha Christie novel, where Death is tastefully signaled by a thud from another room. EATING RAOUL is an excellent introduction to the topics of Los Angeles, food, swingers, and real estate loans, and resist as you may, you'll end up cheering for Paul and Mary as they work toward their dream of opening their very own restaurant.

Paul Bartel's ultra-low budgeted quickie is still one of the best black comedies ever made, even though I found it less funny than when I first saw it, approximately ten years ago now. Then again, it was my very first "politically incorrect" comedy and I've seen many others since… This is a very charming film and the reasons why it works so well especially are the overly eccentric characters and the straight-faced acting performances of the talented B-cast. Writer/director Bartel and his favorite B-movie muse Mary Woronov star as an uptight and exaggeratedly square couple, the Blands, who're social outcasts in the wild L.A. region. Paul and Mary dream of opening their own little restaurant in the countryside but they have trouble financing it, while so many "swingers" waste their money on parties and bizarre sexual fetishes. After a first – and accidental – homicide, Paul and Mary find out that they could make easy money by luring more perverts to their apartment and kill them. The situation gets more complicated when Latino-crook Raoul discovers what the couple is doing. There aren't any special effects or gore and the set pieces aren't at all spectacular…and yet this little gem is entertaining from start to finish! Especially the first half (when you make acquaintance with the bizarre Blands) is terrific, with brilliant dialogues and offensive – yet very clever – black humor. It's obvious that Paul Bartel was an acolyte of the all-mighty Roger Corman, since he manages to deliver a fun movie without a large budget being required. The gags are simple - often not more than the sound of a frying pan hitting a human head – but it works and the atmosphere is so tongue-in-cheek that you can't but love what you see. I do wish that the film had been a little longer, especially since the ending comes so abrupt! "Eating Raoul" also contains many interesting trivia aspects, like for example the name of the co-writer, Richard Blackburn. Especially when you're familiar with Blackburn's other (and only) film "Lemora: a Child's tale of the Supernatural", this screenplay is a giant change in style. The supportive cast is marvelous as well, with the dazzling Susan Staiger as "Doris the Dominatrix" and Ed Begley Jr. as a pot-smoking hippie! Good fun!

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.