Eat Your Heart Out (2006)
10th Mar 07



Plot
Who says romance is dead?

Welcome to the gore-fringed thrills of Eat Your Heart Out where romance is very much dead, as in undead, and comes in the shape of flesh-eating New York whore Pandora (Melissa Bacelar). Pandora has been spending her nights taking a bite out of more than just her customer’s wallets when she happens upon loser Jeffrey (Jack Dillon) and decides to change the way she lives her life.

Out goes the clientele list and wandering Times Square by night for trade / meals and in come quiet nights listening to Jeffrey chat aimlessly about bugger all. However soon severe stomach cramps kick in when Pandora doesn’t get her daily fix of warm flesh and she realises that soon she will need to tell her soon-to-be fiancé about her odd cuisine choices and her non-living status. Will true love survive or indeed will Jeffrey?

Review
Comedy and horror are uneasy bedfellows and unless you’re of the standard of say An American Werewolf in London it is unlikely you are going to pull it off. Director James Tucker and writer Joshua Nelson, who previously worked together on the relatively well-received Aunt Rose, have a good go here at mixing the giggles with the gore. Unfortunately, delivered through a cast that for the most part can’t act, many of the choice lines have the guts ripped out of them leaving the words dangling with an embarrassed and ineffective pause to follow.

Thank crap for actor Jack Dillon who not only nails the part of the depressed and unlucky in love Jeffrey but also manages to wring the film’s only laughs out of a fairly decent script. Witness the scene when Pandora announces that she is an ‘abomination of God’ to which Jeffrey responds ‘you’re Mormon?’ This shows how the script could have worked if everyone else in the cast had the delivery that Mr. Dillon has.

The central pairing of Dillon and the nicely doe-eyed and appealing Melissa Bacelar as Pandora works a treat anchoring the romantic plot-line so that you do kind of care a little about their little trials and tribulations amongst all the blood and ample bosoms on show.

The make-up and effects are excellent given the budget, or lack of, with the only gripe being the over-repeated shot of Pandora’s reddened chops chewing on flesh which is hanging half in, half out of her gob rather than in it. Wasn’t this girl taught any manners at all? Sure the viewer needs to know that she is eating the flesh but seeing the same thing each time kind of bores instead of induce shock/pleasure in the viewer. Fortunately elsewhere bottom lips ripped off with teeth and fingers and heads sawn off all hit the right buttons.

Despite there being a large number of men all being eaten by a hooker, no police appear keen on the matter and is kind of written off with a line from Jeffrey towards the end saying that people get killed all the time. I’m sure bodies being found eaten in the dodgy hotels in New York as well as people disappearing when booking from a particular escort agency in the Yellow Pages would be enough to rouse some police interest, but no.

Instead we have a daft second plot line involving writer Joshua Nelson playing a character called ‘The Stalker’ who seems to be the only person in New York concerned about Pandora’s carnivorous appetites but for the purely selfish reason that she ate his brother. Growling and furrowing his brow ‘The Stalker’ thinks nothing of torturing people who may or may not know where Pandora is which makes him no better than the person he is pursuing. Given how sloppy Pandora is at eating you would think it easy to track the messy bitch down.

Speaking of bitches, if there’s one person in the whole movie that Pandora should have snacked on it’s Jeffrey’s controlling, interfering sister. She thinks nothing of recommending her brother as date material to her patients AND delivering them to his house when Jeffrey already has Pandora there. What a cow! No wonder Jeffrey is so low on himself.

One last note! More care could have been taken with the choice of Jeffrey’s bed sheets. No really! Firstly they didn’t match the covers, a major grumble, and secondly they had red roses, or something like it, for a pattern which made it very confusing as to whether it was blood or not to a viewer that is always keen for some on-screen spillage. Seriously it all became very distressing.

Posted by
S Cockwell

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