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Amos Lassen wrote on 06/28/2012:

Made in 1982, “Eating Raoul” has long been considered the epitome of a black comedy and now it is available on Criterion Blu Ray. Basically it is the story of a boring Los Angeles couple who find a new way to open a restaurant. It all started when Paul, coming home one evening, finds his wife Mary (Mary Woronov) fighting off a swinger who has come to the wrong apartment. Paul (Paul Bartel) hit him over the head with a frying pan and ended his life. When they had to dispose of the body, lights went on and they decided to advertise for other “swingers” to stop by and then the couple would kill them, rob them and dispose of the bodies. Everything was going fine until Raoul (Robert Beltran) appears and wants part of the action.

Paul and Mary are a nerdy couple who want to move out of their apartment building because of the number of swingers that live there. It is their dream to open a restaurant in the country but there is just no money to do so. However, when they kill an intruder, a plan hatches and before long they are inviting swingers over, killing them, stealing their money and…..

“Eating Raoul” has had a cult following since it came out and it is really nothing more than schlock. “The pace is rather slow throughout, yet Eating Raoul is also goofy and surrealistic. The over the top sexual innuendos and rampant sexual scenes are countered by the bizarre calmness of Mary and Paul Bland as they take care of victim after victim. Not really a laugh out loud movie (except for the botched robbery scene and the hot tub sequence) but it will make you chuckle.

One thing that was great about this movie is that even though it was obviously a 80s cult flick, the music was, for the most part, great. It gave a cartoonish feel to large portions of the movie and added atmosphere to the strangeness that permeated throughout. The hammy manner in which the murders take place also adds to the offbeat feel of this film as there is no emphasis on violence and blood. No gruesomeness needed, for if the frying pan does the job, why not use it?”

Here is a film that has something to say about swingers, s&m, rape, murder, and cannibalism without becoming tasteless. In other words, it has something for everyone. This is late director Paul Bartel’s greatest accomplishment.

“This is a classic tale of rags to riches, of a respectable married couple, down on their financial luck, who, with initiative and a novel idea, manage to fulfill their dream, a hotel in the country. If, to get there, they must pose as bondage merchants, murder their clients, rob their wallets, give the bodies to a petty thief who sells them to dog-food companies as choice meat, than such is the nature of success.

“RAOUL” declares itself as a true story from the Sodom and Gomorrah of Hollywood, where fantastic wealth co-exists with degrading poverty. The film is a moral tale, about steering the middle-course, about what it takes to be normal and decent. It plays like straight John Waters, but just as hysterical, even if, eventually, it cannot sustain itself.
The featured couple is called, appropriately, the Blands, and it is significant that their serial-killing weapon is a lethal frying-pan. Paul, played by the director, is the epitome of his name: balding, pedantic, so obsessed with fine wines that he gets fired from his low-rent off-license for over-ambition. His wife, Mary, is less bland, which is why she is more easily tempted by the dark side. While Paul remains sweetly virginal, she, a hospital nutritionist, works in an environment where she is continually harassed by lecherous Lotharios, and is knowledgeable enough to know that the most humiliating revenge is to have them receive their enema from a burly dandy.

Bartel is a Roger Corman alumnus, and this can be seen in the fluid, economical filming, and the functional set-ups that are actually quite complex. The film’s very classical structure is at odds with (piecemeal) filming that has characters seem, ineptly, to wander up to the camera, although this has the unsettling effect of making the creepy nonsense seem curiously real.

There is also a hint of suppressed Gothic in the telling – Mary’s hysterical normality is so camp she could be Vampira – while the Blands’ blandness is under attack from all sides. It’s bad enough to have ‘swingers’ (a charmingly 50s word for perverts that chimes with the Blands’ adorably tasteless 50s furniture left them by Mary’s mother until she dies) crowding the tenement for sleazy, Warholian, sado-masochistic parties, but to have one of them storm into your apartment, throw up all over your carpet, nearly die in your lavatory, bring your husband to the party to be humiliated/initiated by Doris the Dominatrix, and then come back to violate your wife, is an imposition.

The film makes satirical points enough – the rich and professional classes are all vile, violent sleazes, while the S&M ‘sickos’ are sweet, loving mothers who live in pleasant suburban avenues so indifferent to capitalist Darwinism that they help out the competition. The racism needed to keep normality normal is shown in the horrifyingly hilarious shooting of a store-robber, or in the final fate of self-confessed ‘Chicano’ Raoul, which suggest Peter Greenaway might be a fan of the film. The cannibalism theme has a long satirical history in jibes on the bourgeoisie, and it’s no surprise to learn that Bartel is a devotee of Bunuel.

But the film’s real satire is to show how normality must survive in a society, Hollywood, that has obliterated any recognized sense of reality”.