"Calvaire" (2004) d/ Fabrice Du Welz

Thanks to Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz, you can pretty much cross the High Fens natural reserve in Liege off your bucket list of places to visit. When I think about tonight's review ...also known as The Ordeal (2004), and rightfully so, as Du Welz has concocted a bizarre mix of beautiful cinematography and gripping psychological terror, the madness of  love, and dreary, ominous isolation that makes for a pretty wild ride, while tapping into earlier films like Psycho (1960), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Deliverance (1972), and Misery (1990). If those titles don't paint a vivid enough picture of what kind of lunacy you're in for here, it's outta my hands, folks. I've done all I can...


"Dominique, nique, nique, s'en allait tout simplement...c'mon, ev'rybuddy!"
After cabaret singer Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) speeds away in his personalized van from his last successful gig belting out mundane love songs (in a personalized cape, mind you) to horny Belgian grannies (and smitten nurses who Polaroid him their boobs) in a backwater convalescent home, he breaks down during a sleet storm in the dark and desolate wilderness of Liege, bumping into a disheveled-looking chap named Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) who's been searching for his dog, Bella, in the elements, and who points him towards the empty local inn, where an quirky little fellow named Paul Bartel (Ha! ...as played by Jackie Berroyer) sets him up with a bed and breakfast, on the odd promise that he does not go near the village. While out on a nature walk, he does just that, spying a horrific gaggle of crummy-looking mutant locals as they take turns making love to a pig in a nearby barn. Bartel promises that his van will be repaired by morning, and the men trade a joke for a song after dinner, amid melancholy vibes over Bartel's wife, Gloria, who apparently broke camp ages ago.


"Check your pay envelope, I put Polaroids of my boobs in there.", notes Mademoiselle Vicky (Brigitte Lahaie). 
The next morning, things have gone from disadvantageous to deplorable. Marc's van looks to have been broken into and rummaged through, the only phone has been disconnected, Bartel is nowhere to be found, and the small closet in his room is now filled with women's dresses. He then notices an angry Bartel outside smashing the fuck out of his vehicle with a sledgehammer, and runs down to try and reason with him, only to get brained with the detached battery. Bartel sets the van on fire and drags the unconscious lounge singer off. When he finally comes to, he's wearing a dress, tied to a chair, and getting his injured, bleeding head shaved by the innkeeper, who seems to have convinced himself that the man is his wife, returned to him. When Marc tries to escape, Boris returns him to Bartel's tractor (which is spotted by some of the locals on a trapping run), and later crucifies him (!) to some support beams in the barn. From here, the situation only turns more distressing by the sickening minute.


"If you don't pay attention to my footwork, you'll never be able to do the 'Tor Johnson' ...You've got it all wrong. Sway left, then right, then left, then right, then..."
Du Welz followed this effort up with Vinyan (2008), Alleluia (2014), and Colt 45 (2014), all of which are on my "to watch" list, for sure. Phillipe Nahon you'll probably remember from things like Haute Tension (2003), and Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002), as well as Seul contre tous/ I Stand Alone (1998). Brigitte Lahaie, as most of you should well know by now, was one of France's premier pornographic exports in the late seventies. I found this one as deliriously demented and rotten as any grindhouse flick from the seventies, though beautifully framed with a decidedly arthouse lens, lending a surreal feel to the unpleasant proceedings which might be a cultural curveball to mainstream genre fans. On the scale, Calvaire shuffles about to the tune of three Wops, a must-taste for discerning Euro-horror palates out there.


"Okay, well, since you put it that way...", shrugs Shotgun-face (Laurent Lucas).

"Seul Contre Tous"(1998)d/Gaspar Noe

Argentinian-born, French-based director Gaspar Noe openly flirts with brilliance in his 1998 feature-length debut, shot in a combination of 16mm and CinemaScope and known internationally as 'I Stand Alone', a skeptical potrait of the futility and inner turmoils that an unemployed French horse butcher, portrayed by Phillipe Nahon, of "Haute Tension" fame, faces over several brutal days.Noe's lens captures a bleak northern French landscape wrought with poverty and desperation, while his abrupt cuts are like cinematic exclamation points for every statement he makes through the cynical, darkly humorous inner monologues of his lead's voice over.Some directors like to give you a punch in the guts while unveiling their vision to you, while others like Noe prefer to stomp you in the balls repeatedly, an especially effective method of purveying emotion.Though it may be all adrenaline rush and nostrils full o'victory when you're the one laying the boot, it's a humbling, reflexive experience when it's your bag getting pulverized, and a skillful artist like Noe gives you a bit of both here, while touching on sensitive issues like class warfare, immigration, incest, foot fetishes, knuckle-driven feticide, filicide, and suicide, and even giving you, the viewer, a William Castle-style warning card right before the shit hits the fan, so you can decide if that pipe cleaner you call a spinal column can handle what he's about to give you or if you're going to have to use that thirty seconds to flee to the concession stand like a weepy little mealy-mouthed girl with skinned knees.

"...I didn't pay ten francs just to get foot-titted, bitch."
Through some voice over narration and a montage of still photographs, we learn of our butcher's(Phillipe Nahon) disconsolate history, having been orphaned and turned out by a priest at an early age before landing in prison after having stabbed an innocent man for raping his autistic daughter, mistaking her first menstrual cycle for foul play, selling his butcher shop to a Muslim, and condemning her to a life in an institution in the same rueful swoop.While on lock down he engages in some man-on-man prison cellie action, and vows to maintain a selective memory of the experience once he's back on the outside.As if that didn't suck a big enough Hefty three-ply full o'dicks,  he inadvertently knocks up a highly unsexy barkeep upon gaining freedom, and is forced to move to the north of France with the expectant bo-hemoth and her mother on the promise that she'll buy him another butcher shop of his very own once they've relocated.Of course, she renegs on her word and sends him out on increasingly embarrassing job interviews, none of which pan out for our anti-hero.He eventually wigs out and wallops the parturient pig's pup-pouch repeatedly into a mitt-induced miscarriage before checking the fuck out like Keith Moon's Rolls in a Holiday Inn pool and getting his ass back to Paris, where his old buddies can help him out in ducking his criminal responsibility and getting back on his feet, while shacked up at the same flophouse where his institutionalized daughter was conceived years earlier.

Trente secondes? Sacre Bleu! Nous allons prendre nos cafés et cigarettes obtenir nos ânes dans le hall et le faire vite!
Of course, all of his former chums are currently more impoverished and destitute than he is, and he's forced to endure more fruitless interviews because of it, as the last of his money is wasted on drinks and junkie whores.His internal monologue becomes increasingly classist and racist, and after being denied work at a slaughterhouse he once did business with, he decides to kill the manager with a handgun he pilfered while fleeing the lethargic anchor he was married to.He plots the bourgeous boss' demise at the local watering hole, but gets kicked out after drunkenly puffing chests with the owner's son.Upon discovery that he's only got three bullets, he assigns each round to their respective recipient, one for the manager, one for his poor daughter, and the last for his own brainbox.After the whole nasty family reunion culminates in the father and daughter having sex in his room after lifting her from the home, him shooting her in the carotid artery and through the brain afterwards when the first bullet doesn't prove fatal quickly enough, finally shooting himself, before revealing that he'd been playing out the whole thing in his head, afterall.Overcome with the emotion of not committing a murder-suicide in a dirty room that he's behind on paying on, he begins to fondle his daughter and contemplates having sex with her her anyway, remarking to himself that the world only condemns their type of love because it is 'too pure'.Roll credits.

You've gone and spilled all the spaghetti sauce onto the shag carpet, you clumsy girl.
Definitely an impressive effort from Noe, and we'll certainly be checking out some of his other films here at the Wop as time passes on.From a technical standpoint, Alone would score one higher, with Noe's beautifully framed shots, dripping with despair, and inventive cuts, but I'm gonna go ahead and rate the film on enjoyability instead, and though I chuckled at some of the internal dialogue and grooved on the sporadic but shocking violence, it could have used a bit more of either or both to achieve glorious four Wop status.Kind of a polished-up, sleeker Combat Shock(1984) vibe going on, and that's not a bad thing to groove on once in a while, really, is it?Still, a depressingly nihilistic, incestuous, xenophobic, hateful, womb-wallopin' good time to be had by the whole effin' family, in my book.My kinda flick.See it, then watch it again once you've picked your mandible off the floor from the first screening.

Cancel 'The Ainsley Harriot Show' on me, will you, you bastards?!!?