Eating Raoul

Eating Raoul is a film that stars the stunning Mary Woronov and the late Paul Bartel as "Paul and Mary Bland," a couple living in the degenerate, psychotic hell's belly of the beast known as mid-1980s Los Angeles, a place infused with drunks, bums, hoodlums, con artists, pimps, hold-up men, swingers, swingers, and more swingers. And a lot of people casually kill, such as Paul's boss, who fires him from his job at a liquor store for selling too-expensive wine.

Paul and Mary want a new home and to open a restaurant. When a couple of crazy, Seventies-style sexual revolution pervs try to rape Mary, they both get conked over the head by Paul (one after nearly drowning in a toilet) and tossed out with the garbage. Mary and Paul realize they can make a lot of money killing perverts and then robbing them, so they start a "Sex fantasy" service on the advice of a dominatrix friend (Susan Saiger), wherein Mary dresses up in fantasy costumes (Minnie Mouse, Nazi victims, hippie chicks), and they kill such inestimable actors as Ed Begley Jr. and Buck Henry. Then along comes Chicano "lock and key" man Raoul (Robert Beltran), who discovers the bodies, and gets cut in on the deal, disposing of Paul and Mary's victims by selling the cadavers to a dog food maker. Yeah.

Raoul kills Ed Begley Jr. (credited as "Hippie") while Ed tries to rape Mary, and then Mary and Raoul begin an affair. Raoul tries to kill Paul, Paul tries to slip Raoul saltpeter (via his friend "Doris the Dominatrix", played by Saiger), and, by the end of the film, everyone has pretty much guessed why it is called Eating Raoul.

The performances of the three leads (Woronov, Beltran, and Bartel) are all excellent. The satire is reminiscent of Pink Flamingoes for some reason, or Serial Mom, something John Waters would do. No big surprise there. The body count Paul and Mary rack up is pretty extraordinary as well: they electrocute a bunch of nudist sex maniacs in a hot tub, by throwing in a bug zapper. And these murders are done in such a blase way, it's like, "Hey, we're killing for profit, no sweat. What's the worst that can happen? We end up on death row?"

But this film is essentially a cartoon, so I wouldn't expect them to act any differently. Humor needs some sort of grounding in reality, though, or else, as a bug zapper tossed into a hot tub, it will simply frizzle and spark, leaving a trail of stinky smoke in its wake. It took me forever and a day to finally get around to watching Eating Raoul a second time so I could review it because, well, it just didn't charm me. The characters aren't likable, the funny seems forced; Mary and Paul show themselves to be even more wickedly perverse than the people that they kill, and, on the whole, it's too much like a dirty comic book to be taken as much more than light, amusing, and sometimes apt in its condemnation of social hypocrisy.

The entire message of the film is...what exactly? That society has become sickly obsessed with sex? That violence is more acceptable morally to people, who sink even lower than the degenerate dregs that they slaughter? It feels as if there was a point in standing back and pointing a finger at fetishists and people the Blands condemn as "freaks," all the while exposing the viewer to the fact that they are pretty much the ultimate freaks. But the director, Paul Bartel, forgets that along the way.

Sade wrote, in one of his introductions to one of his versions of Justine, that, "Given the choice of suffering due to virtue or prospering due to vice, the wise man must surely begin to question the logic of choosing the virtuous path over the criminal one." Or, something to that effect. Paul and Mary make that choice, as does Raoul, and everyone else in this film. And that's pretty much where the fascination with it, for me, ends.