Brocéliande

I am gonna be generous for this one because this movie, no matter how bad other viewers say, was able to keep my attention from beginning until the end.

Sure. the plot and twists are very typical. There are times where you wonder, "Where have I seen this before?" or something like that. However, it's impossible for people to watch this sort of movie and expect a Lord of the Rings-style storyline. It only aims to provide light entertainment for us to enjoy without stretching our heads.

Besides, the actors played their part okay and the leading lady Elsa Kikoïne was extremely beautiful. I really want to see more of her in the future.

The movie overall has a good pacing, never drags itself in one place for too long, and enjoyable to watch all over again. A good rental.

Another try, another miss. France may be doomed for not being able to produce a good horror movie. I mean... the least they could do was to shoot the movie in the forest of Brocéliande, but even the forest is fake ! It was shot near Paris ! The subject is useless, the actors are really insignificant and the text makes you wish you were deaf. Nothing could save it.

Bad... to the bone. I wasn't warned. I want my money back.

After a few misfires, we are still waiting for THE French horror movie that the critics will certainly vilify, but will launch a new trend. Not this time. Doug Headline can't be accused of not being knowledgable in the genre (He is editor of a high-class fantasy imprint, has worked for legendary magazine Starfix.), but why a scenario that uses EVERY cliché in the book (except maybe the Odious Comic relief) ? Why make it so predictable ? Even the nods towards Argento fails flat. It's not even an euro-teen movie like the German "Anatomy", much better, just a compilation of scenes that barely seems to have any relation one with the other and features LOTS of plot holes. The whole "Celtic" aspect is barely touched. And, after a "revenation" painfully predictable, the screenplay offers us a boring, endless chase in a subterranean necropole which seems bigger than Parisian catacombs. I really wanted to love this film. Really. But even a mother would not. Oh, and writer Valerio Evangelisti was supposed to have a cameo, but I vainly looked for him.

In the early 00's, production companies had a short-lived craze for supernatural genre movies in France after "The Crimson Rivers" and "Brotherhood of the Wolf" turned out to be hits, so several movies were green-lit or saved from their "direct-to-video" fate. However, France, as opposed to the US, UK or Italy, has little tradition of fantasy B-movies and it turned out quickly that "Samouraïs", "Bloody Mallory" or the "Crimson Rivers" sequel were ill-advised attempts at recreating a kind of magic that had never existed in French cinema in the first place. As they flopped, producers have gone back to their usual fare: derivative farces or the umpteenth self-referential tribute to French New Wave by a former critic from "Les Cahiers du cinéma".

"Brocéliande" could only have been green-lit during this short window, as it serves no other discernible purpose. It's your by-the-book slasher movie mixed with vague mythological element and horror references and you'll find bimboesque female characters, a French University looking like a US campus and plot twists so lazy you don't even care because you had guessed it by yourself an hour before, even before the movie started.

These elements make all the fun of a 70's or a 80's B-movie and you expect them in a 70's or 80's movie. However, we're not in the 80's anymore and nobody warned director Doug Headline, as this tribute to the slasher movie genre is nothing more than a derivative slasher movie. Headline himself is no rookie and has been writing as a critic about this kind of pictures since the early 80's but as a first time director he shows a lack of skill and ambition that makes "Brocéliande" a bore.

When you put together clichés from a movie subcategory and hand them to a skilled and inventive director such as Wes Craven or Quentin Tarantino, you get a "Scream" or a "Death Proof", movies that are imitations from old guilty pleasures but also magnify these clichés and add a great deal to them. That's called "talent" and that's why you can't confuse these recent movies with their original inspirations shot decades ago.

"Brocéliande" takes the lazy path and only reproduces the worst elements from past movies (unfortunately for the male viewer, the gratuitous nudity is mostly missing). There are very strong similarities (presumably unintentional) between the plot of "Brocéliande" and the reviled "Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch", as both deal with supernatural Druidic evil rituals and some silly attempt at taking over the world on Halloween night. As even the plot of "Halloween 3" makes more sense than this one, it means that something seriously wrong went with "Brocéliande".

A rather enjoyable debut from a director who seems to have a sincere fondness for horror films of a bygone era. In this fairly simple storyline (a murder mystery that turns into a monster movie), film buffs will find a hodge-podge of references to many genre classics, like Dario Argento's thrillers of the 70s or English Hammer films (in particular John Gilling's Plague of the Zombies for its ritual scenes), and even to stranger oddities like Jack Arnold's "Monster on the Campus" or the Avengers British TV series. Add a bit of Celtic mythology for a background, some fight scenes, and stir well... Now mixing all this into a pleasant, if air-headed, B-movie makes for an interesting challenge! It doesn't always succeeds but is certainly better than other French genre efforts in the field. The direction is often stylish and the performers have fresh faces, the music score is quite good.

Of course this is a low budget production (it probably didn't cost more than a couple million dollars), and does suffer from it: several scenes could have been helped by better production values. And there are a few plot holes and a couple of long stretches. But it finally wins the day by retaining its charm to the end just out of sheer unpretentiousness. Not so common a feat, these days.