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Urban Flesh (1999 / 2007)



Urban Flesh

 

Director Alexandre Michaud understands what a splatter film is all about: gore!  Urban Flesh didn't have much of a budget, the story was fairly basic and the quality of the picture has that homemade feel, but when it comes to gore, this film delivers!  

Urban Flesh was originally conceived in the 1990s before the internet had really become a way to widely distribute independent films.  Shot in Montreal Canada, the original release was intended for underground mail order distribution and lived its first life in the late 1990s.  As Michaud made more films, Urban Flesh was re-edited to be included as part of a more recent distribution deal and now the film has been given a second breath through the internet market.


The story is about a group of four urban cannibals (three young men and one teenage girl) who brutally kill and eat citizens of an unnamed Canadian city and the police inspector who is desperately tracking them down.  The original cut of the film apparently gave the police inspector more screen time, but when the 2007 edit was made, Michaud decided that the film could really be cut down to focus more on the gore that splatter fans want!  While giving the film a much higher percentage of gore, it also streamlined the story to its basic form.  The end result is a movie that is not for the casual horror viewer, but an excellent example of an underground splatter film of the last decade.

As with many of the underground splatter films of the 90s, Urban Flesh was created on almost no budget.  The audio is pretty bad, the picture quality looks cheap and there isn't much to the story.  The acting is uneven.  Some of the actors were surprisingly good while others were probably friends of the director who had never acted before in their lives.  The best performance of the film was KM Lavigne as Inspector Vincent Blake.  His acting stood apart from everything else in the movie as being completely convincing.  Noteworthy performances were also delivered by Marc Vaillancourt (the former singer of the hardcore band Blasting All Rotten Fuckers) who played Igor the butcher and also by Mireille Levesque who played one of the victims.

Although I wouldn't recommend this film to everyone, I would recommend Urban Flesh to any true fan of the underground splatter genre.  I'm looking forward to seeing Alexandre Michaud's more recent work!

Gore-o-meter rating: 4 out of 5 (Oh yeah, there's gore!)

Skin-o-meter: 0.5 out of 5 (A couple of scenes are close, but not much skin in this one)