Share
'Calvaire (The Ordeal)'
Michael Atkinson
Tuesday, August 1st 2006
Swoon over 75-percent-cocoa chocolate and corked blond ale all you want, nobody ever said the Belgians couldn't make perfectly mediocre genre movies. Crafting his call-Hollywood debut, Fabrice Du Welz takes on, in Calvaire, the hoary crazy-hick gore-thriller that is again suctioning up gazillions in teen-geek cash. Recite the drill: unassuming "normal" characters get lost/stranded in the wilderness (Texas, Slovakia, Australia . . . Belgium?), meet up with deranged locals, suffer all types of malicious damage. It's not the most sophisticated pulp formula in history, and Du Welz has not seen fit to upgrade it, except with the committed acting of Laurent Lucas as the luckless schmuck and Jackie Berroyer as his opposite number, a pudgy, avuncular innkeeper suggesting a grizzled Paul Giamatti. But of course hints of lunacy arise, Lucas's facile entertainer becomes a prisoner, and the torture begins. Calvaire does have a psychosexual angle—read it as Psycho inside out and backwards—but the movie hardly has enough beef on its bones to make a meal. The very notion that movies about torture are considered "horror," and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy.
Recent Articles
More by Michael Atkinson
Life Is Sweet
With its seventh installment, Michael Apted's drama of aging approaches a half-century
Satanic Verses
'. . . So Goes the Nation'
Vivid and Zesty: Old-School Feminist Emancipation
Breathless Pop Filmmaking
Site Search «
Most Popular
-
The Strangest Landlord-Tenant Relationship In Town? Stacked up in cubicles for decades, immigrants living in a Bowery tenement may have a very unusual situation.
-
Spike Jonze Can't Quite Get Spirit of Where The Wild Things Are On Screen Max and the gang's all here. Let the mild rumpus start!
- A Bloomberg Score Card: The Mayor's Hits and Misses
- We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
- On Michael Jackson's Mercifully Goofy, Cheerful This Is It
| buy, sell, trade 10,273 | musician 3,583 |
| rentals 12,791 | jobs 2,037 |
| adult entertainment 34,867 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|