Everyone wants to kill Vincent. And it’s not difficult to understand them. It makes us who are watching stick a pen in his hand or hit him in the face with the laptop closed, which is a problem for the film. The idea in theory would be that we (the audience) are on Vincent’s side and we cannot explain why suddenly, one day, his life is tormented by the fact that some people, apparently for no reason, want to kill him and do not they stop until he leaves their field of vision. In theory there is something that is infecting some people, Vincent is not the only one who suffers these attacks and perhaps there is some kind of apocalypse underway. In theory. In practice the mystery is not created because it is clear why they want to kill him: Vincent is so limp, sad, submissive and unbearable that even if there wasn’t this kind of contagion it would still be worth killing him. Regardless.
In the background you can see that I am also among those chasing
Thus begins (badly!) a film that belongs to the category of those who know very well that they are manipulating exploitation material, but are so advanced and so intellectually superior that they do it with a detached eye, realizing that they are manipulating low material, however with the ability to elevate it. It is the definitive act of cinematic snobbery: re-reading a commercial film through the lens of arthouse cinema. All in Vincent must die shouts broken glasses, everything is a politically conscious version, injected with intellectualism and inflated to a dinghy of pretensions, of an Italian B-series film from the 80s (those precisely in the last phase, desperate and without money). Not that there is a lack of “action” scenes eh! This type of film must respect the rules because it is based on the imitation of formulaic cinema (which in turn always respects the rules). But it is action right at its lowest, action from someone who has never seen it. And if he saw it he didn’t look at it.
It happens that Vincent moves to the countryside so as not to see anyone, he meets a neighbor who obviously attacks him too and they end up in the disgusting septic tank fighting each other. The neighbor possessed like the others to kill him, Vincent who desperately tries to survive. Understood??? The septic tank, the shit, the struggle to survive, the sick society… And when it seems that the apocalypse could break out, because Vincent meets another like him, a homeless man who says he was a university professor before this curse (God holy! A university professor!), and discovers a kind of group online where all those like him give each other advice, when it comes to breeding a dog because dogs can detect the outbursts of anger of those who want to attack them, that’s when any real exploitation film would come to life, here comes the love story.
METAPHORONE!
Vincent, in a twist with a very low level of plausibility, meets a waitress who owes money to petty criminals, resists some of her homicidal attacks and falls in love with her. Reciprocated! The two learn to live with homicidal fits. How this waitress fell in love with a grey, useless and depressed man like Vincent, despite his worrying syndrome, remains a mystery. But what do we care? This is (clears throat) “MORE THAN AN EXPLOITATION FILM.” However (the voice returns to normal) it is also much less than an intellectual film. But much much less. It is the imitation of a trend, the unimaginative re-proposal of what much better filmmakers do, copied and remade because that is what is being done in this historical moment.
“I saw Nicolas Cage do this once”
And the fact that all the time we are quite happy that everyone attacks that idiot Vincent, is proof of the fact that Stephan Castang (who wrote and directed this masterpiece), is not paying homage to a genre he knows. He is not one of those directors who actually loved this type of film, knows them by heart and presents them personalized, adequate and made his own. If anything, Castang saw those imitations there, those already rehashed versions and thought he could do it too. Maybe he even watched a couple of real exploitation films for the occasion, just to see the effect it has. But there is nothing here that even reminds us of the real dynamics, that evokes that sense of satisfaction that is the goal of a film of this kind. This is apocalyptic cocktail cinema, with sophisticated presentation. And when the open final arrives (and how wrong you are) the despair is total.
Suggested DVD-quotes:
“If they don’t kill him, I will”
Jackie Lang, i400calci.com
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