my brief thoughts on.... 'Trouble Every Day'

Ah, yes.... the French horror cinema. Yet again another movie from across the pond. It stars Beatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo in a story of erotica and canniblism. Sounded like an interesting mix and I am a fan of Vincent Gallo, so it seemed like a no brainer. Well, what I didn't count on was the fact that this was from the first half of the 2000's. At that time, the French still felt like a movie had to be pretentious to be good and by my count there hasn't been one good horror movie that was pretentious. I'm not saying that they don't exist, I'm just saying that they're like oil and water.... they don't mix. Now this movie isn't in French, not the whole thing anyway. It's a mix of French and American.... I suppose so Vincent Gallo wouldn't need to learn the language. The cover for the DVD, the stills from the movie and some certain scenes in it were just beautiful. Very well done images of a bloody woman doing different things. All things pointed to a good movie going experience. Well, things didn't work out that way. If this movie had been made last year and was like this, then I might have lost faith in the French horror cinema. Luckily it was from long enough ago that I can forgive the error in judgement.

The plot is simple. A man, who becomes cannibalistic when he's aroused heads to France with his girl. He's taken a job over there and is moving to start a life there. Meanwhile, a woman with the same afflection is basically a prisoner in her own home. The doors and windows are all sealed up and she is almost an animal. A couple of guys come by there very often and try to get in. She keeps enticing them to break in, but her intentions aren't pure. The man is doing everything he can to contain his urges, however it eventually overwhelms him. Soon he meets up with the woman in the house and things kind of get messy. This movie was not good. Maybe I missed the point, I hope that was the case. It was just so slow and there was hardly any dialouge and when people did speak, it didn't seem to move the plot along much. A lot of things are implied and a lot of that leads to confusion. The scenes mentioned earlier of blood and the woman are the only parts of this movie that were worthwhile. They're shot in a way that's very flattering even with the subject matter involved. I really wanted to like this movie. It had the recipe for something that could have been great. It's not because it was slow, I like movies that build to a climax no matter how slow. It's not because it was a bit pretentious, movies can be pretentious and still be good. It's not because of the actors, they're good actors.... it was just that they were in a bad movie.

This is something that I never need to see again. A 1 out of 5 star movie will, generally, always be a 1 out of 5 star movie. This just had nothing worth talking about. I wish I could pinpoint the reason it was so terrible. There are a lot of reviewers out there that thought this was a great movie. Maybe I'll never understand why that is and to be honest, I don't know that I care to understand. I don't want my money back, nor do I regret spending the time on it. This movie has been on my radar as something to see for a long time. I just finally felt it was the right time to watch it. Now I can move on with my life and it's one more free space in my Netflix queue. I'm not a fan of cannibals and this just adds another nail in their coffin.

Good French horror films: 'Haute Tension aka High Tension', 'À l'intérieur aka Inside' and 'La Horde aka The Horde'