FrightFest review – Vleesdag (Meat Day, Meat Kills)

FrightFest review – Vleesdag (Meat Day, Meat Kills)

Ever since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (at least), there’s been a general anti-carnivore tone to horror films with rural settings … by showing people being subjected to the horrors routinely inflicted on livestock, audiences might be getting a dripfeed of the animal rights agenda.  Since TCSM, how many films have featured hulking, drooling sadists in bib overalls using sledge-hammer, cattle-prod, or bolt-gun on screaming townies who then get carved up and served as Farmer Vincent’s fritters?  Of course, it’s possible exploitation filmmakers don’t actually give two hoots about where their hot dogs come from but just recognise that you can always get a reaction from a jaded audience by hanging someone upside-down from a meat-hook and cutting a throat.  The image of the potential informers hung like sides of beef in The Long Good Friday has had a lot of mileage.  Directed by Martijn Smits and written by Paul de Vrijer, the Dutch extreme gore movie Vleesdag – which translates as Meat Day, though the preferred international title seems to be Meat Kills – tackles this sub-genre head on with some exceptionally unpleasant set-pieces, but has a more complicated set-up which doesn’t so much both-sides the issues as focus on the way groups of people who think they’re in the right can decide their opponents are less than human … even if they’re the sort of people who sincerely believe they’re doing the Lord’s work.  One of the most obviously psycho characters here turns out to be a fundamentalist Christian.

The plot set-up is – and I know this is a niche crossover connection – very like a relatively recent plot thread on the BBC’s ‘everyday story of country folk’ The Archers.  Mirthe (Caro Derkx) wants to get in with the Animal Army, a group led by the charismatic Nasha (Emma Josten), and has buttered an her old schoolmate Jonathan (Sweder de Sitter) to get a job at the pig farm/slaughterhouse run by Jonathan’s father Jonas (Bart Oomen) so she can film covert footage of regulations being flouted and pigs being abused before slaughter.  Caught doing this, she’s fired but takes the film to Nasha & Co, who plan a raid on the farm to release a lot of pigs before a big killing session … only when they arrive, in suitably bloody pig masks, they find the pigs aren’t there and Jonas is also absent, leaving behind his three children, one of whom is a very sick little girl (Juliette van de Weerdt).  Frustrated by the thwarting of the original mission, Nasha and her manic punk fanatic sidekick Ish (Sem Ben Yakar) set about torturing Jonathan – who is ear-tagged – and his more aggressive brother Jacco (Derron Lurvik).  Things escalate and Jacco is subjected to electro-shock and inundation in boiling water while Mirthe – and well-meaning tagalongs Donna (Chardonnay Rillen) and Humphrey (Tommy Zonneveld) – have qualms but don’t actually try to defuse the situation.  Then Jonas comes home, with a shotgun and righteous fury.

Vleesdag begins as a home invasion story in which the home invaders presume they are vigilante good guys – then, like so many Desperate Hours/Last House on the Left films, has the attacked family rally and fight back with extreme ruthlessness … which includes letting a ravenous pig loose on a bleeding eco-warrior who so the meat-eating order can be illustrated.  Jonas is a corner-cutting thug who defends his family by resorting to murder, though he has his own issues – a recently dead wife, a failing business, a very sick daughter, at least one son who is against his whole lifestyle – which contribute to his fury.  And it becomes obvious that there’s something very wrong with Nasha, who is plainly more into violence to humans than kindness to the beasts.  Both groups are riven with dissent and varying levels of commitment, and the root cause of this specific set of horrors is Mirthe’s longstanding desire to be part of a cool crowd who will never really accept her.  She is only able to get in with Nasha by playing up to and betraying Jonathan, and what gnaws throughout is that she hasn’t done this for a good cause but for herself.  Like a lot of horror fans/critics, I got fed up with rote torture films twenty years ago – and a movie has to do more than just rip people to bits in squalid circumstances to get my attention these days.  Vleesdag does that.