Eating Raoul

The most delicious blackly comic collisionof sex, food and murder, Bartel's film arrives as a delightful surprise from the former court jester of Roger Corman's exploitation stable. Featuring Bartel himself and his frequent B-queen, Woronov, as the Blands, innocently stranded amid the hedonist detritus of LA, dreaming (like their Hollywood forebears, the Blandings) of rural retreat, Paul and Mary's Country Kitchen. And dreaming vainly, until 'accidental' homicide propels them into a scheme to exploit carnal as well as culinary appetites, luring disposable perverts to a deadpan doom with the haphazard help and hindrance of such figures as Doris the Dominatrix and Hispanic hustler Raoul. The style stays straight-faced, the more to crease ours with the disparity between sick joke frenetics and a gentle, unruffled sitcom sensibility. A genuine treat for civilised cannibals.