Eating Raoul

20th Century Fox International Classics | Release Date: March 24, 1982

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

69	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

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Ty Burr

Paul and Mary Bland stop at nothing to open a restaurant in Paul Bartel’s scabrous black comedy. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The most delicious blackly comic collision of sex, food and murder, Bartel's film arrives as a delightful surprise from the former court jester of Roger Corman's exploitation stable. Read full review

Rita Kempley

Eating Raoul is an American film that's good enough to be European. [05 Nov 1982, p.19]

Joseph Jon Lanthier

A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Read full review

Keith Phipps

Despite the casual homicide and a premise rich with Reagan-era political undertones, the gleeful satire draws inspiration as much from Bugs Bunny as Luis Buñuel. Read full review

EmpireKim Newman

It shouldn't work, but it does. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

An endearing view of a past time and filmmaking style – think Corman with a heart – Eating Raoul offers a bare Woronov, a prime slice of sexy-ugly that can never be duplicated, just like this film. Read full review

Jack Kroll

Eating Raoul is only one of the many outrageous things that Paul and Mary Bland do in this outrageous black comedy that's almost certain to be the up-from-underground movie of the year. [11 Oct 1982, p.103]

Vincent Canby

It is full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The appeal of Paul Bartel’s tongue-in-cheek approach is that he manages to take his story to such a ridiculous extreme, remain genuinely funny and successfully tell his perverse story. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

A terrifically droll satire on both horror movies and American middle-class values. Despite the subject matter, our hero and heroine emerge as genuinely sympathetic characters, which ultimately makes one wonder where the film's true sympathies lie. Read full review

Pauline Kael

This spoofy black comedy is thin-textured and it's sedated; it doesn't have enough going on in it -- not even enough to look at. The nothingness of the movie is supposed to be its droll point, but viewers may experience sensory deprivation.

Gary Arnold

The movie proves a curiously harmless pet of a black comedy: It barks and snaps at you in fitfully funny ways, but it's essentially tame, pipsqueaky and more than a trifle antiquated. [05 Nov 1982, p.D1]

Jay Scott

Eating Raoul is often very funny, but it guns down its targets (hot tubs, taco stands) without revealing anything new about them - it's broader than parody, less pointed than satire - and it crudely manipulates the audience into congratulating itself on its own hipness. [15 Oct 1982]

Roger Ebert

Problem is, it's so laid-back it eventually gets monotonous. If the style and pacing had been as outrageous as the subject matter, we might have had something really amazing here. Read full review