Fumar Causa Tosse

Quentin Duplex wrote the very weird, 'Deerskin', which I did enjoy. And this is just as crazy as that. I admit the trailer for this, is very bad, and really does not do the film justice, as it's entertaining, and is short too. It certainly earns its rating for violence and gore, buckets of blood, monsters get killed, and the stories that are shared during the movie and the whole film story itself, is bizarre, funny and quite mad.

The story is about a sort of super hero group with names about smoking, it's metaphoric in nature, but their actions are not. The five key players are very likeable and written well, the production design, costumes and whole look is 1970's Japanese Kaiju movies / Power Rangers rip off / homage, done crazily. But it works, just, thanks to the short run time and performances too.

Some great effects that are done real well, and used sparingly, and the tone is not to be taken seriously, which you can't, and that's the point. 6/10 for this, just not enough for a 7. A limited release and audience for this one, if you can find it. The ending is just as nuts as 'Deerskin'.

Welcome to the wonderful and bizar world of writer and director Quentin Dupieux. I have been walking on this very place called earth for many decades now and I must confess I have never ever before met any director as uniquely weird (and unnervingly funny) as director Quentin Dupieux.

I have seen ALL of his movies and this is one of his less weird scripts, but BEWARE, less weird in Quentin Dupieux' world means it is still the craziest, most unnerving and thoughtprovoking story you will have ever witnessed. I am dead serious!

It's at first an unassuming simple and playful story about some action heroes. Then it turns into a macabre (yet still hilariously funny) story about a woman who finds a helmet and suddenly becomes a serial killer. And it ends on a "lighter note" about the destruction of the entire planet depending on some galactic recipe for soup.

Forget about the story though. Forget about trying to make sense of it all. Fish can speak. Dismembered body parts can still smoke. And making love to a acid vomiting puppet is sexy. It doesnt make sense, but it doesnt need to. It's a Quentin Dupieux world on it's own. It's almost as wonderful as dreaming...and having a good laugh while at it...

Yes, welcome to the extraordinary world of director and writer Quentin Dupieux.

Highly recommended. Such a shame Dupieux' work isnt released on a much wider scale. So many folks, from so many countries would be delighted to see this French director/writer genius at work!

Thank you for reading my 2000 th review on Imdb!

Five vigilantes dressed in blue who can invoke, death, destruction from the compounds in their smoke, Mercury and Nicotine, Ammonia, Methanol - Benzene, plus a rat who dribbles green, you wouldn't stroke (unless you were an attractive young lady with a fetish for vermin, they do exist apparently!). Sent away to come together and prepare, revealing stories leaving eyebrows in the air, hats that change wearers perception, machinery of misconception, defective robots lead to anguish, gloom, despair. Then Lézardin decides to stub earth's light, extinguishing a planet with his clout, can Tobacco Force exhale, create a cancer to avail, getting hooked into a cycle, with no way out.

Quentin Dupieux never seems to make a conventional movie, and for that, I love him. The bizarre imageries of his imagination makes me curiously wonder what his daily thought process is. For Cigarettes Causes Coughing, it's yet another subversive trek that will leave you confused and wanting more explanation.

The American advertising made this look like a weird take on Marvel movies, but as usual, it morphed into something else entirely. We have a superhero group that is in malaise, breaking due to other conditions of the typical human experience. Jealousy, selfishness, family obligations and so forth are making them ineffective in the field. So what is needed? A group retreat.

But we don't see any real hashing out of emotions or team building per se, it's mostly just existential dread and stories about the inevitability of death. It's always a tough sledding to figure out what Dupieux is trying to convey, simply because his version of reality is rarely coherent. Amidst the washed out color of the worlds he creates, he leaves all meaning for the viewer to decide. What would happen if Nick Fury was in the middle of a love triangle with Black Widow and Captain Marvel? It's one of those weird scenarios that I am sure Dupieux thinks of while sipping his cognac.

The trick to watching these types of meaning is to understand there might not be one, or it might require some reading to figure it out. On the other hand, they sure are strange and entertaining anti-film.

The avenging "Tobacco Force" group of crime fighters is struggling to function. After many years of combating enemy beasties using their superpowers - the chemicals that, when combined, cause cancer - they are all just falling out of synch. This has not escaped the notice of their ferret-like boss "Chef Didier" who sends them all to a remote retreat where they are to work on their teamwork skills. Around the camp fire, one decides to regale the others with his most terrifying story - and thereafter, one by one, they proceed to outdo each other with increasingly incredulous stories whilst the two women of the group - "Nicotine" (Anaïs Demoustier) and "Ammoniaque" (Oulaya Amamra) pine over the spurned affections of their really pretty revolting, dribbling, boss (anyone remember "Roland Rat"?). For a while it's quite quirkily entertaining, this film - but after about half an hour the joke has worn thin, the pace drops off and the whole thing just loses it's way. It is original - at times it reminded me a little of "Galaxy Quest" (1999), and clearly there is a warning against using the dreaded weed, but Quentin Dupieux didn't really have enough material to sustain this - even for eighty minutes. That said, it is still worth a watch and there are occasions when it made me smile - just not enough of them - and on the telly will do fine.