Bradley Cooper’s been a busy man the last few years. His profile is getting somewhat larger thanks to roles in such movies as New York, I Love You, He’s Just Not That Into You, All About Steve, Valentine’s Day, The A-Team, and everyone’s favourite boozy farce, The Hangover. However, just mere seconds before becoming one of those ‘it’ people housewives love so much, he starred in 2008′s The Midnight Meat Train, which, as you can already imagine, isn’t exactly a romantic comedy. In fact, The Midnight Meat Train is another Clive Barker adaptation taken from his collection of short stories, Books of Blood: Volume I. The film also stars British mute and all-around tough guy, Vinnie Jones, who, true to form, only says one word the entire movie. Anyway, The Midnight Meat Train is a lot better than Dread, another Barker adaptation we recently looked at, a wicked splatter flick that offers over-the-top scenes of gruesome violence and enough computer generated blood to fill an entire subway car. Which is exactly what happens, actually.

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We’re out the other day, the wife and I, and we happen across a bin of two-for DVDs on sale. If you’ve never rummaged through a bargain DVD bin before, I suggest you do it the next time you come across one, because that is where you’ll find the only movies worth watching, movies that were never really made at all, but born in that bin, deep down, sheltered from artificial light, waiting for you to come along and release their awesomely bad power. Now, lucky for us we scored some pretty sweet finds, including George Lucas’ first ever movie, THX 1138, Blade Runner (director’s cut, of course), and some whimsical cartoon, The Last Unicorn, that will no doubt be magically awesome if watched under the proper influences. But the real treasure we unearthed that day was a movie I had only ever heard about through various underground sources or read about on various underground web sites. Then there it was, its cover so desirable, so becoming, so fantastic, so absolute, no red-blooded man or woman could resist its lure. I’m talking, of course, about Tokyo Shock’s The Machine Girl (2008).

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