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Eating Raoul

  • 1982
  • R
  • 1h 30m
IMDb RATING
6.8/10
9.6K
YOUR RATING
Eating Raoul (1982)
Buddy ComedyDark ComedyFarceQuirky ComedyComedyCrime

A relatively boring Los Angeles couple discovers a bizarre, if not murderous, way to get funding for opening a restaurant.A relatively boring Los Angeles couple discovers a bizarre, if not murderous, way to get funding for opening a restaurant.A relatively boring Los Angeles couple discovers a bizarre, if not murderous, way to get funding for opening a restaurant.

  • Director
    • Paul Bartel
  • Writers
    • Paul Bartel
    • Richard Blackburn
  • Stars
    • Mary Woronov
    • Paul Bartel
    • Robert Beltran
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.8/10
    9.6K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Paul Bartel
    • Writers
      • Paul Bartel
      • Richard Blackburn
    • Stars
      • Mary Woronov
      • Paul Bartel
      • Robert Beltran
    • 88User reviews
    • 68Critic reviews
    • 69Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 2 nominations total

    Videos1

    Eating Raoul
    Trailer 1:36
    Eating Raoul

    Photos82

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    Top cast37

    Edit
    Mary Woronov
    Mary Woronov
    • Mary Bland
    Paul Bartel
    Paul Bartel
    • Paul Bland
    Robert Beltran
    Robert Beltran
    • Raoul Mendoza
    Susan Saiger
    Susan Saiger
    • Doris the Dominatrix…
    Lynn Hobart
    • Lady Customer
    Richard Paul
    Richard Paul
    • Mr. Cray - Liquor Store Owner
    Mark Woods
    • Hold-up Man
    John Shearin
    John Shearin
    • Mr. Baker - the Horny Patient
    Darcy Pulliam
    • Nurse Sheila
    Ben Haller
    • Dewey
    Roberta Spero
    • Swinger
    Vernon Demetrius
    • Swinger
    Arlene Harris
    • Swinger
    Buster Wilson
    • Swinger
    Marta Fergusson
    • Swinger
    Garry Goodrow
    • Drunk Swinger
    Richard Blackburn
    • James from the Valley
    Hamilton Camp
    Hamilton Camp
    • John Peck - Dishonest Wine Buyer
    • Director
      • Paul Bartel
    • Writers
      • Paul Bartel
      • Richard Blackburn
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews88

    6.89.6K
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    Featured reviews

    7Coventry

    Gives you the munchies!

    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!
    7alice liddell

    Irony this PURE...

    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.
    Infofreak

    Still one of the most entertaining black comedies ever made.

    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.
    9GaryKurt101

    One of the Funniest Dark Comedies Ever Made

    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.
    9YAS

    A heartwarmingly black comedy full of murders

    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.

    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      The budget was so low that they could not afford to mock-up an ad printed in a fake newspaper for the Blands' swingers advertisement so production designer Robert Schulenberg instead designed an ad and ran it in the "L.A. Weekly," an alternative newspaper. Unlike the vast number of replies the Blands got in the movie, the real ad attracted only one response.
    • Goofs
      (at around 1h 15 mins) When Paul throws the bug zapper, it hits the camera, causing the camera to shake up and down and go out of focus.
    • Quotes

      Mary: At the store, can you buy a new frying pan? I'm a little squeamish about using the one we use to kill people.

    • Crazy credits
      There is a credit for "Guest Electrician"
    • Connections
      Featured in Precious Images (1986)
    • Soundtracks
      Exactly Like You
      Music by Jimmy McHugh

      Lyrics by Dorothy Fields

      Published by Shapiro, Bernstein, and Co., Inc.

      Performed by Jonathan Beres

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    FAQ16

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    Details

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    • Release date
      • October 1, 1982 (United States)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Languages
      • English
      • Spanish
    • Also known as
      • Smaklig måltid
    • Filming locations
      • 1600 Argyle Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA(Paul passes the Cathay de Grande nightclub while on top of the van)
    • Production companies
      • Bartel
      • Films Incorporated
      • Quartet
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    • Budget
      • $350,000 (estimated)
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      1 hour 30 minutes
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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