This is either going to end up being the longest or shortest review of a movie in the history of time. My life is forever changed after watching this extremely bizarre movie… so lets get into it.
Vital Stats
Released: 1982
Starring: Clarence “Big” Miller, George Dawson, and Andrew Gillies
Directed by: Chris Windsor
Written by: Phil Savath, Laurence Keane, and Chris Windsor
You’ll notice that this time I included the writers, and that’s for one simple reason: I need you to understand that three people wrote this movie. Three. More than one person. Three people.
This movie is absolutely transcendent, and truly I don’t know how to even start talking about it. Summarizing the plot is a useless and futile endeavor, because it is almost immediately nonsensical. Essentially we have the story of a Butcher who happens to accidently create a power source, called Balonium, that is desired by aliens portrayed by literal toy robots, and in order to obtain it the aliens bring the mayor back to life as a zombie, after he is killed by the titular Big Meat Eater after he fires him.. and.. honestly I feel like I’m describing a dream that I heard about fourth hand.
As a musical it doesn’t really work either, the IMDB page lists eight songs, total, across the 82 minutes, and none of them are particularly good or interesting. They are all extremely bizarre though, you really can’t take your eyes off of them. Like if a non-sequitur was somehow…sequitur? I don’t know how that makes sense.
We should probably address the moose-shaped-elephant in the room, and that is that Big Meat Eater is a Canadian film. The clues are everywhere, the story taking place in the fictional town of Burquitlam. Which will be a huge groaner for anyone from BC. So I’ll just let it hang there, and you can google the two cities in BC that is a combination of. It’s also just littered with Canadian accents, and does that classic Canadian film thing of looking about 15 years older than it actually is. So you’ve got a movie released in the 80s, that looks like it was released in the 70s, and is set in the 60s. A true and sincere Canadian classic.
This is also the kind of movie that feels like it’s maybe racist? But in ways that people’s grandparents from a very specific very small town are racist? Where it doesn’t actually translate as being racist and is just kind of impossible to decipher. The titular meat eater is a man named Abdullah, who’s first song is called “Bagdag Boogie” [sic], features white women in vaguely “middle eastern” garb, and you later learn that Abdullah is Turkish. It all just comes together in such a baffling and strange way that it becomes impossible to properly articulate what is happening. Like when your great grandfather says a word you’ve never heard but you’re pretty sure it’s not ok to say it, y’know?
We also spend some time with a vaguely Russian, vaguely Ukrainian, vaguely… German family of immigrants who have a teenage son who is fully British, and of course they have an innate ability to tell fortunes, but also it’s a scam.
Did I mention that the British teen, who looks like fucking present day Rivers Cuomo, is trying to discover a power source to drive the .. mayor’s Cadillac into space? I genuinely feel like my brain is dying somehow.
Honestly the movie is just one of those things that is well worth sitting down and watching. It’s baffling, probably terrible, probably problematic, and completely incomprehensible, but… I think I loved it? Maybe?
Definitely.
10/10, who cares?