Eating Raoul

Another of those movies I had heard of but never seen, largely because I was much too young to see it upon its original release, is the extremely dark comedy Eating Raoul. TCM ran it a few months back, which gave me the opportunity to record it and eventually watch it to do a review here.

It's the early 1980s, so just before the whole yuppie thing really kicked off, but the roots of it were certainly there. Paul Bartel, who also directed, plays Paul Bland. He lives with his wife Mary (Mary Woronov) in a Los Angeles-area apartment building. The two of them work lower-end jobs but have dreams of bigger things, considering themelves more cultured than the people around them and wanting to open up a restaurant.

But things go from bad to worse when Paul tries to dissuade a customer at the liquor store where he works from buying cheap plonk; this causes Paul's boss to fire him. Mary is also facing a good deal of difficulty in her job as a nurse as she's being treated badly by both her co-workers and the patients. And then the bank turns down her application for a loan to open that restaruant.

Things can still get even worse, but there's a silver lining about to show up. Other tenants in the apartment building where the Blands live host swingers parties, which horrifies the Blands, who are so chaste they don't even sleep together. At one of those parties, a man gets so drunk that he walks out of the party and right into the Blands' apartment, where he throws himself at Mary. Paul tries to defend his wife and in doing so, accidentally kills the intruder by hittng him over the head. And the same thing happens a second time. But the couple decide nobody will miss these men, so they pilfer the cash off of them and dispose of the bodies.

It's this that gives them the idea to turn the tables on the swingers. If they can find other such swingers, they can lure those men to their apartments, go on a killing spree, and take the money which will help them to open up the apartment. The meet the dominatrix Doris (Susan Saiger), who gives them the idea to take out ads in a Backpage-style magazine that has classified ads catering to the swingers.

Things start looking up for the Blands, but they need some physical security, so the call in a locksmith, Raoul (Robert Beltran), to install new locks. They don't realize until later that he's a scam artist, who installs locks such that he can pick them later and get into the apartments and steal people's valuables. But when Raoul does this to the Blands, he's caught out and everybody realizes they've got blackmail material on each other, since the Blands are in the middle of offing another swinger.

So the Blands and Raoul decide to go into partnership together, with the Blands killing the swingers for their cash, and Raoul disposing of the bodies and fencing their other valuables. As in any crime movie, however, you have to wonder when the scheme is going to go sour and the parties are going to turn on each other....

I'm always up for a good dark comedy, so it goes without saying that I loved Eating Raoul. It's like a much darker and more twisted version of Arsenic and Old Lace. But the much more open sexuality of Eating Raoul also makes it something where I can understand how people who are into stuff from the Production Code era may be a little put off by it. If you haven't seen it before, it's one that you probably should watch.