Humains

I watched this movie because I'm learning French, and because I am pathetically in love with Sara Forestier after watching 'Le Nom de Gens'.

Unfortunately, this film is bobbins. Total bobbins. It's one of those movies that makes you wonder, at what point did ANYONE think this was a good idea?

If you wish to experience how bad this movie is, simply imagine the worst episode of the X Files possible. Then have someone kick you in the balls.

Despite this movie's suckiness, I'm still in love with Sara Forestier. And I still think that Dominique Pinon has a brilliant face. I want to make a movie in which Dominique Pinon and Toby Jones play gay lovers.

I saw this at the Chungmuro International Film Festival in Seoul in August 2009. I must say this movie deserves not a thumbs down, but the middle finger.

The way the plot just speeds up is so ridiculous and so many questions are left unanswered. It basically degenerates into a killing fest toward the end and the ending itself is great in that the movie is finally over.

What the hell were they thinking of when they made this movie? What message about Neandrathals did the makers want to send? What a waste of my life watching this stupid film.

I saw this film at the BIFFF. A film festival in Brussel, the movie felt like a ripoff of the hills have eyes and the descent. The only thing that interested me was the science behind it all. That there special species evolved before the homo sapiens came. The acting is not terrible but nothing special either. The directors were make-up artists on the film A la interieur. It showed it was there first movie, because of the feeling you get you are watching a shameless copy of the above mentioned Hollywood films. The gore in the film is also not so great, after seeing the film Matyrs i know for a fact, the french film community can make something really frightening. If i can give you an advise watch it on DVD.

HUMAINS seems to be gathering a lot of bad reviews here on the IMDb, but I have to confess and say it wasn't all that bad. Certainly it's no classic and indeed it feels slightly below average for the genre, but it's a lot more entertaining than your usual braindead American slasher or the like.

The French setting immediately gives it a level of quality that's atypical for the genre. The format of the main characters going on a hike to the Alps to search for the missing link is an interesting one, and although the set-up turns out to be more effective than the denouement, at least HUMAINS has plenty of action and incident to keep the viewer watching.

On the bad side: it's rather cheesy and the prosthetic make-up effects look silly and like something you'd expect to see from the 1960s rather than now. On the plus side, HUMAINS has something of the foreboding of a film like THE DESCENT, with which it shares more than a few similarities, and the character actor Dominique Pinon is always a pleasure to see up on screen. You could do worse, in other words...

I strongly dislike when people try to make a statement by rating any movie they didn't like a 1 and calling it "the worse movie of all time". I must still admit that I couldn't find any reason not to rate the movie "Humains" at the lowest end of the scale. Directors Jacques-Olivier Molon and Pierre-Olivier Thevenin show a lack of experience and, much more alarming, any sense of vision, storytelling or purpose in what is an extremely boring movie.

I'll scratch the barrel and find a few positives first:

-Some of the wilderness locations, while awfully shot, are beautiful. -The basic premise of surviving prehistoric beings was interesting and holds potential.

Everything else is pretty much crap. The bunch of actors on display here play two- dimensional characters unconvincingly. The script is goddamn awful and will make anyone cringe. Nothing is lifelike (very disappointing since this is usually the strong suit of French cinema). The editing is pure crap and the amateurish film score is certainly the worse I have heard in recent years.

It seems the directors wanted to shoot a classic horror story of a group of stranded survivors facing an intelligent enemy. We've seen mutants, monsters, aliens, thugs.... this time we get a new variation with some sort of weird-looking cavemen that look more like caricatures in a children movie than anything else.

If you look at the credits of both directors, you'll see they are special effects make-up specialists. One can easily guess it was a dream for them to direct a movie that would also require their skills. I can't say I find anything there very impressive but it is better than the digital effects, which are laughable.

What really amazes me is that four (FOUR!) writers are credited for writing this snooze-fest. With two directors and four more writers, you would think there would be enough creative power to come up with something better in a single evening of brainstorming. You would also think such a group would peer-review each other, challenge themselves to something less ridiculous.

I doubt any producer will finance these two directors anytime soon after seeing the garbage that is "Humains".