Electric Meat
He may be handy with a meat cleaver and the name of his day job may be based upon a pun melding his two interests, “Debutchery” the shop below his residence, but other than that “the Butcher” is serious, in a houseshare with his silent and judgemental landlady who watches from where she lives downstairs while he has turned the upper rooms into his abode and makeshift photography studio.
The walls a mosaic of all his many, many muses, willing to pose and perform to his direction, cash paid and their numbers obtained from the flyers adorning the local call box, the hallway is papered with the rejection slips from the magazines to which he has submitted, variations on the word “unsuitable” as repetitive as his work, fetishised images of female form and deformation.
With Caspian Faye as “the Butcher” and Emily Booth as “the Landlady,” among the many Muses of Electric Meat, written by Doghouse’s Dan Schaeffer in his directorial debut, are Nina Courson, Jasmine Summer, Sylvia Soska, Tyra Deville, Melle Kiou and Zii Lizard as Lush, Calliope, Phaedra, Erato, Clio and Polyhymnia while Jasmine Smith is “the Meat Puppet,” rejected but still of use as an inanimate mannequin.
Shot in monochrome which aims for moody but just looks flat on digital, Lynch’s influence is overwhelming, the industrial noises and crack in the wall to a world within a world of Eraserhead, the visual disturbances and obsession with stolen still and moving images of Lost Highway, characters gazing at Polaroids or mirrors which gaze back at them, even his Playstation commercial, smoke rewinding to its source.
Told entirely without dialogue, what might conceivably work as an ambiguous experimental short long overstays any semblance of interest at over ninety minutes, Schaeffer defying the accusations of misogyny of his earlier script by stripping away any pretence of character or narrative, presenting the film as edgy but offering nothing more than a parade of dead women, voiceless, bloodied and poseable.
A crude chronicle of degradation, remunerated and negotiated but still distasteful, an adolescent fantasy of extremes, of powerless objects to be dominated rather than people powered by crackling electricity from the local substation in Banstead, Amy Winehouse gazing into an abyss of cathode ray monitors, the shape of Nekromantic but absent the existential nihilism, Electric Meat is sliced and served only for the director’s indulgence.
Electric Meat had its world premiere at FrightFest
