Binge & Purge (2003)

Posted on Oct 06, 2004 under Horror |

Written and directed by Brian Clement
Starring
- Tanya Barnard
- Stephan Bourke
- Fiona Eden-Walker
- Moira Thomas
- Amy Emel

If you’re anything like me, you’ve occasionally said to yourself, “You know there’s a really tasteless-but-good cannibal supermodel movie to be made.”

There may yet be, but this isn’t it. Cannibalism, check. Supermodels, after a fashion. Tasteless, obviously. But good, not so much — and that’s even within the strictures that the first three terms place upon our standard of judgment.

Things do start out well, I’ll give it that. First it’s a brief prologue in fascist Spain, where archival footage is mixed with modern video to show us a couple of anarchist crusaders who come across a comrade eating a dead body. Naturally, they kill him.

Fast-forward to slightly into our own future, in a COPS-style sequence that makes good use of the cheap look of underlit video by casting it as cinema verite. The elder of a pair of cops on night patrol regales his rookie partner with the joys of being a police officer now — now, after a series of terrorist attacks, and the accompanying roleback of civil liberties and increase in police powers. (For all of this exposition, nothing ever comes of it. Nothing. The cops we see throughout the movie behave, if not like our real-world law enforcement officers, at least like bad-movie cops we’ve seen before without any special situations explaining away civil liberties.)

**“(Gulp) Boy, this is NOTHING like the Police Academy movies said it would be.”**

The cops are following up a tip from their superior to check out a certain girl’s apartment, which they do with guns out and flashlights beaming. In the kitchen, they find the girl (Terra Thomsen), hunched over the body of of the pizza delivery boy, merrily munching away. Gunfire ensues, and backup arrives in force. (I will say this for the production: Despite a production budget that probably topped six figures only if you count the two below the decimal place, they sure got a lot of convincing cops in uniform, along with squad cars etc.)

Also arriving on the scene are three private investigators — Number Eleven (Fiona Eden-Walker), May (Tanya Barnard), and Vanzetti (Stephan Bourke). Eleven used to be a cop-assassin, which explains th number in lieu of a name; it also explains why the captain (Chuck Depape) knows and disdains her. What it doesn’t explain is why he allows the trio to enter the apartment to investigate instead of his own men. (My expectations for the film started slipping at this point; while the two patrolmen were adequate actors, Number Eleven is just bad enough that she may sink the ship. And the captain better keep his day job, too.)

The investigators find the girl still alive, as well as the two cops; all three are currently sharing the pizza boy. After an “exciting” firefight whose excitement is drastically hampered by the murky underlighting, the investigators leave and stalk off into the night.

The “Courtney Love” special.

Meanwhile: A fashion show. Name-brand designer Karl Helfringer (Gareth Gaudin) unveils his new creations, as draped on his stable of name-brand models: Audrey, Damiana, Renee, Sandra, and Angelique (that’s Moira Thomas, Samara Zotzman, Melissa Evans, Becky Julseth, and Amy Emel, and no, you really don’t need to keep them straight). Oh, and it turns out that the girl we just saw munching her pizza boy, Kami, was also one of them, strangely missing from tonight’s show.

And here’s where the movie is setting itself up for failure, simply in terms of what it can accomplish with the resources available. The girls are pleasant-enough-looking real people. They do not, however, look like world-famous supermodels. The apartments in which they live do not look like the apartments of world-famous supermodels. While this movie doesn’t set new records for the disparity between the story told and the means to tell it (see Blood Red Planet for that), it still shows very clearly that you can’t make a movie about supemodels relying solely on amateur actors and free locations.

So. The supermodels, it turns out, are all into this cannibalism thing; they pick up a homeless guy, take him home, give him a big bubble bath, then snip of his willie (really, was that necessary?) and chop him up for supper. Cue long, lingering footage of a bevvy of smiling women, gnawing hungrily on bloody entrails. Why entrails? Mostly because intestines are themselves rubbery-looking, and thus easy to fake with latex props. Compare that with muscle fiber, which is a lot harder to fake. And I doubt you’re going to find many actors willing to a) work for free and b) chew happily on raw beef for their art. So get ready to see a lot of rubber intestines throughout the movie.

**Hey, I’ve got one of those. (The cleaver, I mean. Not the brain. I mean, I have a brain, but… Ah, never mind.)**

The investigator trio, meanwhile, is showing their particular genius. Vanzetti makes a connection between the cannibal supermodel and a story his grandfather told him from his days with the anarchists in Spain (see? the prologue has a point). It’s something of a logical leap to suppose the two are connected, especially when they toss speculation about Operation Paperclip into the mix (that was the US program to bring German scientists stateside to work for us against the Russkies, you know). Boy — less than ninety seconds of discussion later, they’ve got it all figured out!

Now that it’s been established that the models are cannibals (good for the figure, so they say) and that the private eyes are onto them, the movie settles into a maddening pattern: The girls kill and eat someone. The detectives talk to Helfringer, the designer. The girls eat someone. A reporter who escaped their clutches becomes a cannibal himself. The girls eat someone. Number Eleven has a gratuitous shower scene. The girls eat someone. The police decide to send a SWAT team after the investigators, because the captain’s a cannibal himself. The girls eat someone.

Hey, far be it from me to argue that cannibalism isn’t, like, inherently cool and all, but there are only so many scenes of the camera lingering lovingly over bloody smiles and rubbery guts you can sit through before that fast-forward button looks awfully inviting. Oh, and the models also do cocaine, and spend almost as much time cutting lines with credit cards and snorting as they do chewing on manflesh. Halfway through the movie, I said, “Yes, I get it, the girls really, really like their coke! I’ll believe you from here on out; you don’t have to show me every single time they imbibe.”

Santa’s surliest elves.

The flipside to the numbing consistency of scene after scene of cannibalism is the inconsistency in the nature of the cannibalism itself. Is it a contagious disease? Well, it can apparently be spread by the tainted perfume samples in Helfringer’s fashion magazine, and it might also be spread by personal contact, but only when convenient for the script. And the cannibals sometimes spew a caustic bile all over the meat to tenderize it (just like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly), but other times they just eat straight from the slaughter. Helfringer, who’s behind it all and a cannibal himself, seems determined to spread the disease as much as he can, because… um… look, he’s a fashion designer, he doesn’t need a reason, okay? (He’ll be in for a shock when he finds that cannibalism breeds anarchy, and anarchists don’t buy designer dresses.)

If the whim-driven “rules” of cannibal contagion and behavior remind you of the haphazard way in which zombies were explained in vintage living dead flicks, you won’t be surprised at this second correspondence between the two: Dead cannibals come back as zombies. Sometimes. Well, pretty rarely, actually. One of the dead cops sits up in the morgue (after a full autopsy, mind you — the guy should be more a loose connection of quivering organs), and then at the end, a whole bunch of cannibals killed at a party decide to all come back. Again, this seems more like a momentary impulse incorporated into the script than part of a larger rationale.

You may have also noticed that the COPS theme of the opening has been completely abandoned, and with it went most of the leeway afforded the production values. I know that horror movie directors like to keep things moody and shadowy, but a shot-on-video movie comprised almost entirely of night exteriors and dimly-lit rooms isn’t evocative; it’s eyestrain.

<announcer guy voice>Christmas just got a wake-up call.</announcer guy voice>

But really, the biggest single disappointment, though, is that after the first ten minutes, the entire movie plays out completely straight — without any subtext. That’s not just my English Lit degree demanding academic depth out of every movie I see. But jeez louise, this is a story that includes fascist police forces, identity-wiped assassins, and cannibal supermodels as its subject matter! Is fascism somehow the instigator of cannibalism? Is there something to be said about how the starvation of beauty is self-consuming? Can the cult of personality and the need to belong engender slefish, usurious attitudes toward our fellows? If you think I’m just blathering on with high-falutin’ terms, just think. Think if George Romero had decided to set a zombie movie in a shopping mall simply for convenience, and did nothing with any of the implications and subtext available to him. That’s the difference between a modern horror classic, and a cheap gore flick that’s ultimately forgettable.