Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Ehirerapp Waste of time

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

FlashCallahan Days before Christmas, entertainer Marc Stevens gets stuck at in a remote wood in the swampy region of Liège, after his van breaks down. A man who's looking for a lost dog leads takes to a desolate inn, and the owner gives Marc a room for the night. Next day, the innkeeper, promises to fix the van, asks that Marc not visit the nearby village, but goes through Marc's things whilst he takes a walk. That night, the innkeeper laments his wife's having left him, and by next day, Marc is in a nightmare that may not end......The kidnap victim thriller isn't a fresh idea, it's been done to death, taking someone and pretending that they are someone else, but this one is a little more darker, a little more moody, and the fact that the kidnapper may be the most normal person Marc runs into, adds to the bewilderment.The villagers are absolutely bonkers, or are we seeing these people through the eyes of the innkeeper? Or do they even exist, and are just part of the innkeepers imagination?But the fundamental aspect of the film is the torture that Marc endures, and the humility he goes through with the innkeeper, that makes the film as intense as it is.But it's also the strange set pieces in the film and the quieter moments that really get to the viewer, such as the resident who comes on to Marc, or the scene in the bar after the innkeeper says his peace.Its a difficult film to watch, but its worth watching, but it will leave you feeling a bit low..

kimjarman19 I found this film through my recommendations on IMDb and when I saw the overall rating was 6.3 I was expecting a pretty good horror.. instead all I got was a big steaming pile of crap.I've been going through a few pages of the reviews people have written on this film and I honestly don't know what I'm missing.. I mean I must know nothing about "art" or "dark comedy" if this is what it supposedly is.I sat there for the entire film thinking "oh, maybe something good will happen" "oh maybe the guy will fight back" but no, no such luck.I imagine Bartel's utter madness was supposed to be creepy but it was stupid, just plain stupid. Don't even get me started on Boris, trying to find his dog, then he comes back with a cow.. it's all just utter stupidity and I don't think it was creative or artsy at all. Just a load of jumbled up crap, with weird, vintage looking cinematography which in my opinion left a lot to desire as well.I enjoy an odd film with twists and turns as much as the next person, but this delivered neither. And what's with the village people? I mean I'd half believe if it was just one guy who was nuts but all of them?! No.It started out badly, and ended even worse. There is no plot or storyline.This is one of the worst films I've ever seen and I don't recommend it to people who like horror, at all. Hell I don't recommend it to anyone.

chaos-rampant This is part of the recent wave of French extremity where young filmmakers of some ambition are not content with exploitation as were being done in the 70's but have to have some kind of layer in the back that justifies reworking the experience. Martyrs aimed for some kind of revelation for the viewer in the endurance of watching extremity. Haute Tension had its own needless twist for the sake of having one. Gaspar Noe keeps busy tweaking our end of navigating his juvenile imagination.But because these filmmakers are more adept at visceral response than intelligent layering, most of these layers come across as pretentious and solely for the sake of adding 'weight'.Here we have Straw Dogs reworked to be about a man as the perverse object of backwoods desire. The added layer? A Jesus parable thrown in the back where our man ascends his own Calvary Hill of degradation.The horror is basic and attempts some bargain-basement surrealism. The layer is once more pretentious and useless.

jzappa Lounge singer Marc rounds the boonies of Belgium in a van crooning at assisted living facilities. On stage he's very debonair, with a sequined cape and blush. He sings ballads and seventysomethings and lonely nurses faint away under his enchantment. They propose themselves to him backstage, slip nude photos of themselves into his coat. Marc's stage presence is quite effective. But off stage he's hardly there, without feeling and consequence and whose vision of making it big is distant.Marc's road to his Christmas show takes him through the thickly wooded moorland in Walloon country. It's a murky, inhospitable place, a hinterland of rain-soaked forests and remote, decaying farms. When his van stops working, Marc makes his way to the sole inn nearby. It's a emphatically unadorned one run by an ex-stand-up comedian, the stout and heartbroken Bartel, played skillfully Jackie Berroyer. Bartel provides his subservient generosity and service in repairing the van in return for some companionship. Marc endures. He's got a choice? It's over a tranquil dinner that Bartel's manner starts to alter. Bartel tearily pleads Marc to sing a love ballad. Marc reluctantly accommodates and his performance is enough to persuade Bartel of what he's perhaps thought the whole time: Marc is his long lost unruly wife Gloria. Calvaire is an arduous, revolting and fully effective horror film from Belgium. Part Psycho, part Deliverance and all sinister, it is at the same time disconcerting and gripping. And what sells it is the realistic interest in nuance and the haunting direction of Fabrice Du Welz.This against-type psychological character film, shot on 16mm and printed into anamorphic format, is one of those uncommon, uncategorizable films that subsist at that frequently disquieting junction of gallows humor and horror. Like Roman Polanski's broadly hailed early films, Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire underscores the farce of our existential experience with the bleakest of humor utterly absent in modern American genre cinema. If this were an American film, the fiends at the hub of Calvaire would be misshapen, the result of inbreeding or radioactivity or chemical exposure, anything to separate them and their acts from human. But the monsters at the core of du Welz's Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre hybrid are as human as you get. And that makes the film all the more startling.Du Welz coalesces horror upon horror until this somewhat arguably surreal fable peaks in a sequence so alarming and morbidly engrossing that even Tobe Hooper would put his fingers over his eyes. It doesn't alleviate anything that cinematographer Benoit Debie is so excellent at depicting the churning, whirling insanity. Repulsive, sordid, unhinged, du Welz bizarre, forceful gut-wrencher is an uneasy tumble into insanity.