Calvaire (2005)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I'm of two minds about this movie. No, three.One: I don't like claustrophobic horror movies where things just get worse and worse. 3/10 for taste.Two: This was a well-crafted movie that, refreshingly, relied on characterization rather than special effects. The lack of music added to the feeling of claustrophobia. 8/10.Three: It was a delightful pastiche of many other movies, including Misery, Deliverance, Straw Dogs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Un Soir, Un Train, etc. I'm sure reviewers more familiar with European movies than I could name quite a few more. 10/10 for erudition.Avg: 7/10.

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.

What a boring, poorly acted, generic piece of trash this "film" is. Do not waste your time, I really wish IMDb could edit out the false reviews posted on these horrible movies that are clearly posted by those involved in the film. If you have someone locked in your basement that you want to torture with something hideously boring, lame and fruity then this is your film. If you enjoy movies with actual actors, a plot, entertaining qualities then stay away. What a waste of time this movie was, I am actually p$ssed that I wasted 1.5 hours watching it.Why people even bother to crank out pieces of swill like this is beyond me. Do they actually get anything out of making pieces of cr@p like this?

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.