Eating Raoul

The Basic plot: A bland couple, The Blands, composed of a wine fanatic and a shapely nurse , live in an apartment house filled with sex-pervert swingers , and when they want to go out and own a restaurant in the country ,but don't have enough money ,so they become bondage merchants who kill their clients for cash.But, Raoul, a handsome young thief, comes in and violates their plans.....

The praise: Dementedly funny,original and quirky, you really can swallow it up. The comic acting by Mary Woronov, Robert Beltran, Paul Bartel, and Doris the Dominatrix is perfect, and the satiric, ironic,darkly comic side is played to a luscious extent. The bondage merchant scenes are hilarious so much that I can't tell you, and the theme song adds deeply to the ironic side........Enjoy!

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.

Meet the Blands, the aptly named middle-aged square couple. He's a wine expert, she's a nurse, and they need money to finance their dream restaurant. Trouble is, they're barely making ends meet. What's worse, the apartment complex they live in is infested with swingers, back when swingers were as commonplace as yuppies are now. Mary and Paul find the answer to their problems when one of the swingers tries to put the moves on Mary in their apartment. Paul whacks him with a frying pan, killing him, and they discover the fella's carrying a lot of cash. Bingo! Light over heads! What makes this goofy premise work is the absolutely hilarious, dead-on, deadpan performances of Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov as the Blands. They don't give what you'd call comedic performances, but what they say and what they do seems funny, as they are a duo of decorum surrounded by a storm of decadence. Their performances, combined with a witty and biting (pardon the pun) script, make this an absolute delight, a must for lovers of off-beat movies.

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.

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.