In a move that really makes me question the sanity of Lions Gate, the much-maligned Clive Barker train wreck (no pun intended!) Midnight Meat Train will be available in its entirety (unless I seriously misunderstood the post) free online at Fearnet.

Well, there’s at least one caveat that I could find:  it’ll only be available to watch free on October 30th–namely, the day before Halloween.

This may be the single dumbest move I’ve seen Lions Gate and company perpetrate since greenlighting Saw up to like EIGHT.  You’re going to give away a movie that you wouldn’t release to nearly any actual theatres…but you’re going to do it online.  At Fearnet only.  For one day.

The bandwidth crunch on Fearnet that day is going to be godawful.  I can’t imagine Fearnet having sufficient bandwidth to handle a couple thousand people trying to download the same file in the space of twenty four hours, especially a movie that was both widely anticipated and widely disappointing when it didn’t actually show up in but a handful of theatres.

I suppose it’s possible it could work, but again, why?  Clearly they didn’t want it to succeed–why else would they muff the release so badly?–but why offer it for free on a fairly well respected horror news site?  I’m completely lost at this point, and for Lions Gate, that’s not a new thing to feel.

Popularity: 2% [?]