Now Streaming: MEAT KILLS, Or Rather Misguided People Do...

Hailed as "the bloodiest Dutch horror movie ever" and proudly touting the NC17 rating it got during its States-based festival run, Martijn Smits' Vleesdag a.k.a. Meat Kills seems to be gunning for the gorehounds. As such I almost didn't see it. I knew some people who had worked on it, I heard praise from people I trust, but I wasn't in the mood for torture porn, watching animal rights activists being butchered on a pig farm. I also kinda could not miss it though, because of, well, knowing some people who had worked on it, and hearing praise from people I trust. Ah well...

It was released on Amazon Prime earlier this month so I decided to check it out. To my surprise, what I got to see wasn't primarily a mindless effects-driven gore-fest, but a very decent thriller, well-acted even and with excellent escalation.

In Meat Kills we follow Mirthe, a young woman who desperately wants to join a rather extreme group of animal rights activists. To show she is hardcore enough she conspires to work at a pig slaughter factory and secretly films the goings-on there. The footage is unpleasant enough to awe the activists, sufficiently shocking them to invite Mirthe into their ranks. The group's leader is, in fact, so impressed and enraged by the footage, that she plans to invade the pig farm that very evening and set the pigs free.

Of course things do not go exactly as planned, and shit hits the fan in a very bad way... And, this is important, it's not played like "good activists meet evil farmers". People on both sides are sorry, people try to de-escalate (but fail miserably), and there isn't a clear-cut good group versus a bad group. The film plays surprisingly non-political with its setting. Accidents occur, people jump to the wrong conclusions, and it all happens in an environment full of death traps, knives, guns and saws, a recipe for disaster. Think Ben Wheatley's Free Fire but with cleavers and meat hooks and you're not a million miles off. I was impressed and entertained.

Films of this kind are often more fun to make than to watch, but director Martijn Smits keeps the proceedings lean as well as mean. Time is spent to get to know the main players. It must have been tempting to go all the way over the top early on already, but the tension is allowed to mount until an eye-watering (and very satisfying) finale happens. Acting is often a big weak point in Dutch films, but I have no complaints here. Caro Derkx as Mirthe and Emma Josten as the overenthusiastic boss of the gang are great, and so are their opponents Bart Oomen and Sweder de Sitter as the farmers.

France had its wave of extreme horror films twenty years ago. I never wanted one for the Dutch film industry, but if the quality is of this level... count me in anyway.


Meat Kills is currently available for streaming through Amazon Prime.