MEAT KILLS (aka VLEESDAG, 2025)
New streaming on Screambox from ND Pictures!
Directed by Martijn Smits.
Written by Paul de Vrijer.
MEAT KILLS (aka VLEESDAG, 2025)
A group of activists, including Nasha (Emma Josten) who used to work
in a pig farm undercover to expose them for abuse, descend upon said
pig farm in order to cause mayhem and convey their message that meat
is murder. Once there, they find the pigs have already been cleared
out for slaughter and are caught at gunpoint by the pig farmer and his
family. Now the group must try to survive before the pig farmer makes
meals out of the lot of them.
Now you all know that I’m a sucker for inbred killer family flicks. It
goes back to my love of Texas Chainsaw Saw Massacre where a family
forms a sort of system in order for their bizarre unit to survive.
That’s where I thought this Dutch horror flick was going to go as the
activists, adorned with plastic pig masks, entered the pig farm, armed
only with cell phones and spray paint. But instead of the usual TCM
tropes, MEAT KILLS surprised me by becoming a battle of wits between
two different sides that you find yourself flipping between rooting
for them to survive and then wishing for their deserved demise.
MEAT KILLS is a film that plays with your own morality. Do I want to
see pigs slaughtered? No. But I do love me some bacon on my burgers
and that honey glazed ham on Turkey Day is quite scrumptious. So right
off the bat, I was conflicted when we opened on the slaughterhouse.
Thankfully, only one pig is slaughtered in the opening moments, and it
goes by quickly, though this is the point of many heated conversations
in MEAT KILLS, so the subject of abusing animals set for slaughter is
ever present.
MEAT KILLS (aka VLEESDAG, 2025)
I don’t want to say that I don’t support activism or the right to
protest. I do. But I think am not the only one who is sick of the
protest culture of the moment as it gathers the worst and most extreme
of us and a bunch of angry anything is dangerous. That’s why it’s hard
to root for these activists who lay siege on the farm. What I
absolutely hate is someone enforcing their will and beliefs upon other
people. That’s exactly what the activists in MEAT KILLS do and it
makes it hard to root for them even though they are supposed to be
playing the role of the victims here. Not only that, but in this
series of murders, the activists are equally at fault, showing their
hypocrisy that they find murdering a human ok since it suits their
cause. In the grand scheme of things, it is the activists who draw
first blood in MEAT KILLS. So, when Poppa Pig Farmer (Bart Oomen)
shows up to find his home and farm ransacked, his family tortured, and
one of his own murdered, it’s pretty understandable that he’s pissed
and wanting some revenge. What unfolds is a war between two warring
parties who find themselves trapped in conflict until the last one is
standing.
The back-and-forth carnage is intense as every tool of slaughter
within reach is used by both activist and farmer alike. People are
scalded in boiling water, electrocuted, run over by machinery, and
hacked to bits with cleavers, meat hooks, and handheld circular saws.
This is a gory one and not for the squeamish. Still, the gore seems
justified and gets worse as the battle goes on and tempers flare
brighter. There’s a point to this gruesome spectacle, more so than
just to stack up a body count.
If you’re a fan of films like TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and the like,
this is one for you. But it is deeper than simply bloody and murder.
It shows the ugliness within us all. MEAT KILLS is especially timely
given the culture we are all living in now. And though few on either
political or activist aisle will take this film as a moral lesson, I
think it should. Full of moments where it could go either way as to
who comes out on top and who should, MEAT KILLS is a gruesome, yet
complex little slaughterhouse nightmare.
