When a Paul enters his apartment to find Mary fighting off a swinger who has gotten into the wrong apartment (and thinks that Mary is just playing hard to get) he hits the man with a frying pan, killing him. Their dreams of running a small resturant seem to be in jeopardy until they decide to dispose of the body, keep the wallet, and to advertise for other sexually oriented visitors who are summarily killed, bagged, robbed and disposed of. This goes along quite well until one night a burglar named Raoul breaks in and cuts himself in for a piece of the action. –IMDb
Paul Bartel was born in Brooklyn in 1938. He decided he wanted to direct animated movies when he was 11 and by 13 had spent a summer working at New York’s UPA animation studio. He majored in theater arts at UCLA, and received a Fulbright scholarship to study film direction in Rome, producing a short that was presented at the 1962 Venice Fiom Festival. He later was hired by Roger Corman’s brother, Gene, to direct a low-budget horror featured called "Private Parts, " released in 1972. Roger Corman hired him as a second unit director on "Big Bad Mama, " which led to his directing “Death Race 2000” in 1978. He could not persuade Corman to finance his pet project, “Eating Raoul.” The $500,000 black comedy was made after his parents sold their New Jersey home and gave him the money. Shot in 22 days, mostly weekends, over the course of a year, "Eating Raoul, " starred Bartel and Mary Woronov as gourmet cannibals who lure sex swingers to their apartment, smack them with a skillet, rob them… read more
It would be easy and dismissive to call Eating Raoul a trashy and raunchy comedy that doubles as a social commentary. After watching it again its subtle and creeping genius became more apparent -- deafeningly so by the time the credits rolled.
Wonderful, very funny. Raoul is one of my favorite Hispanic characters from an American film.
A film that walks the improbable line between trash and avant-garde, crying for (re-)discovery outside the realm of cult.