I love watching movies while on the road. It lets me associate the memory of the adventure with an unchanging image, preserving the experience of the moment in my mind. I noticed this particular fixation in my teenage years at a summer camp. All I wanted to do was watch movies, and I have a special kind of nostalgia for all the films I watched with my roommate, huddled close to a phone in the dark of the dorm. The Substance takes me back to Bridgeport, West Virginia; a detour on the way back from the Mothman festival in Point Pleasant. Shazam: Fury of the Gods would have instantly vanished from my memory had I not seen it with my fiancé at Disney World.

My latest film on the road was Cannibal Mukbang, which I watched in a hotel room the night before my sister’s wedding. We found this on Tubi while looking for a bad movie to watch to decompress for the night. On this hotel TV with a weird operating system Tubi plays trailers automatically and we were hooked in by the promise of salacious, misophonic gross-out horror. Cannibal Mukbang is an odd duck. It’s clearly low budget and starts out visually flat in a predictably modern-low-budget fashion - but the longer the film progressed the more its strange energy captivated me. The protagonist is a fascinating figure: a sheltered, maladjusted young adult who falls in love with Ash, a mukbang content creator who’s secretly catfishing creepy guys to cook for her videos.

The real wow factor of Cannibal Mukbang is in its heightened tone that harkens back to the hokiest of Herschell Gordon Lewis films. Ash (the striking April Consalo) and Mark (Nate Wise) have an awkward meet cute at a convenience store that ends with her hitting him with her car and taking him back to her apartment to nurse him back to health. We cut from Mark getting knocked out to waking up in an unfamiliar place being tended to by a stranger. Mark is inexperienced and socially inept, and with the presence of a therapist character the movie suggests Mark is living with some sort of mental disability requiring support from this therapist. This characterization makes Mark seem especially vulnerable to Ash’s coercions as he becomes an accessory to her cannibalistic vigilantism and even begins sharing in the meals.

The film has a “bite back” attitude to it, where we see Ash dispatching men who are embarrassingly sleazy, especially Mark’s c-suite, Andrew Tate type brother. Ash presents a Dexter Morgan style moral code, that she kills and eats men who hurt women to satiate her cannibalistic urges. She then (supposedly) cooks these men into the meal she uses to make her viral mukbang videos, immortalizing her acts of revenge by making a decadent spectacle out of the men. The film delivers on the gross factor, especially as we often jump cut to the uncanny mukbang videos. Where the film disappoints is in its treatment of Mark, whose seeming disability makes him unable or unwilling to divorce himself from the danger Ash brings into his life. As he begins to eat her special meat it’s clear he’s becoming addicted to it, and by then it’s already too late to hope he will show some kind of reluctance or conflict again.

The movie is never boring but once it reaches a certain vector it becomes terribly predictable, a third act that takes every narrative turn you would expect one you reach the midpoint. There’s a hypocrisy to Ash’s virtues and a fascinating burden on Mark’s shoulders, but the movie doesn’t know how to directly address its eccentric garnishes. Instead it slurries its flavors together as the film comes to a rote conclusion. But while the film left a poor aftertaste, it’s rich in ways your standard Tubi fare couldn’t imitate.

I hope you enjoyed this review. If you want to follow me on my Hooptober journey this year, you can find my list here. I also put out a YouTube video recently! Check that out here.