"Paul: With a restaurant named Mary’s Country Kitchen, do you think you can still put the Bland Enchilada on the menu?

Mary: I hope so. It’s my specialty."

If Roger Corman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, James H. Nicholson and, arguably, Lloyd Kaufman are b-movie Gods, then Paul Bartel must at least be considered a minor deity. Those familiar with his work, which I’d wager would be most of this review’s readers, already know Bartel’s distinguished b-movie career. With directing credits for “Death Race 2000,” “Lust in the Dust,” and “Cannonball” and acting roles in “Rock and Roll High School” and “Pucker Up and Bark Like a Dog,” among many, many others, his is a distinctive pedigree to be envied. In sum, if Paul Bartel were a dog, he’d be a rare, purebred shiatsu. With vicious fangs and a penchant for human leg humping.
Unfortunately, I can make no legitimate claim to being a student of Bartel’s work. Of the twelve or so movies he directed, I have only seen one. However, if you only plan to see one Bartel movie, it should probably be…

Eating Raoul (1982)
Directed by Paul Bartel
Starring Robert Bertran, Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, and Susan Saiger

Black comedy is an art form few people ever do well. Some, like “Really Bad Things,” are just plain bad and not worth anyone’s attention. “A Shock to the System” with Michael Caine, though a good movie, only had one really good dark laugh and that right at the end.
One of the most perfect examples of the genre is Kubrick’s political satire “A Clockwork Orange” in which the audience is introduced to an evil psychopath and finds themselves sympathetic to his travails during and after his association with the infamous Ludovico treatment. However, even Clockwork Orange falls short of its aim toward true black comedy and I think the reason is that Kubrick lacked the necessary exuberance and love of the genre that Paul Bartel displays in Eating Raoul. In terms of black comedy, Eating Raoul is a tasty confection from beginning to end.
Paul and Mary Bland (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) have a dream of owning their own restaurant. They are a naive couple living amid Californians near the end of the sexual revolution. If anything, this movie is the last true glimpse of the “swanging” disco subculture with its tacky outfits, hot tubs, and group sex (sniff! God I miss it so!) Paul Bland, a penniless connoisseur of fine wines, steers customers away from the cheap wine sold at the liquor store where he works, which doesn’t sit well with the owner (Carter Country’s Richard Paul) who promptly fires Paul on the spot. Mary, meanwhile, is a nurse at the local hospital. She is trying to earn a living and all the while fending off a barrage of sexual harassment from every male in the movie.
She only has eyes for her fussy, pudgy curmudgeonly husband. (I suppose this is a movie and, therefore, fantasy, but being somewhat fussy and pudgy myself, I salute Mary Bland’s taste in men!)
To realize their dream, the Blands must get ฤ,000 in five days to buy a restaurant up for sale in an upscale area of Los Angeles. They consider selling a few bottles of Paul’s prized collection of Chateau Lafitte, but the buyer ends up stealing the bottles and sticking Paul with a dinner bill. Mary tries to get a loan from the bank, but after rejecting the loan officer’s (Buck Henry) lascivious advances, “Oh, I think you’d be a success at anything you put your hand on,” he has her thrown out.
Things look bleak for the Blands until the night when a swinger attempts to rape Mary while Paul is being handled by a local dominatrix (played with energy by Susan Saiger) at a swinging party in the apartment next door. Paul returns and, with one swing from a frying pan, kills the swinger. In his billfold, they find several hundred dollars.
BINGO! They find an answer to their financial problems that will have the added benefit of ridding the world of these scummy swingers. Through an hysterically lurid personals ad, which features Woronov in a teddy and Bartel on a chain in his underwear, they lure swingers to their apartment, kill them, and take their money. The dominatrix, who turns out to be a rather normal single mom with a child to raise, offers them advice on how to get started.
The plot gets complicated when a con man, Raoul (Paul Bertran), discovers their scheme and offers to help them.
One of the measures I use for judging the quality of a film is how easily the plot can be summed up. Since this is a movie that some of you may not have seen, I don’t wish to go further summarizing it. It’s much too fun to watch as the thread of the narrative unfolds. At no time does the plot seem contrived or predictable. Complications occur believably, even when events become more and more outrageous. I also love how the writing stays true to character. This is testament to the talent Bartel brings to unconventional material. Film lovers can only thank the stars that Bartel has a mordant sense of humor, taste for the bizarre and the talent to bring it off in such a way that you cheer for the Blands in their quest to realize their dreams.
It has some of the most quotable dialog in movies, most delivered by Robert Bertran, who deserves to have more work than he has gotten in his acting career. “You ought to live in beautiful house, Chiquita, with those real good black velvet paintings.” “I’m a hot-blooded, emotionally crazy chicano.” When the Blands admit to their serial murders, he comments, “It’s nice to see such a loving couple as yourselves.”
Bartel also knows how to construct a genuinely steamy sex scene. With just a few moments of screen time, a seduction scene plays out with more heat and eroticism than an entire library of Vivid videos.
The cast is uniformly good. You can tell everyone is having a marvelous time on the set when even bit parts are played for good laughs. Edie McClurg (the mousy voiced, red haired actress who was a staple in John Hughes’ movies Ferris Bueller and Planes Trains and Automobiles) gets great mileage out of a speech she makes as an airhead clad in only a white fur boa.
Eating Raoul is a winning comedy about subjects near and dear to us – sex, sex, sex, and drugs, and murder. The Blands do it all and you love them for it. Find it, rent it, buy it. It’s a true classic.