Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Nerve Twitching Nightmare !, February 19, 2007
[Do buy this film!
Its beautiful that vincent cassel agreed to make this film. It was creepy as hell!
its not at all like they just dubbed the texas chainsaw massacre.
absolutely worth your money & your time.]
Kim Chapiron's "SHEITAN" produced by and starring Vincent Cassel is by far one of the freakiest creep-fest's that I have seen in a while. Vincent Cassel is mind-blowingly scary as Joseph the abnormally strong bazerko housekeeper. Throughout the first half of the film your stricken with that unsettling(not quite right)feeling that something horrible is just around the corner. When you get to the halfway mark of the film horrible slowly starts to reveal itself in small but disturbing little doses. When you hit 3/4 the way through,any sense of normality you have left is swiftly pulled out from under your feet and you are then thrusted into a deliriously nightmarish rollercoaster of a climax that stands to be IMO one of the most skin-crawlingly frightning endings in horror film history. This is another unique & truly creative french kiss to the American backwoods horror film and also more proof that the real horror movies are being made by foreign independent film makers.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
BOOM!, July 18, 2008
Sheitan (Kim Chapiron, 2006)
Once again, we in America have managed to entirely miss a great French horror film. I ask once again why on earth we got a theatrical release of Haute Tension when this-- with a stronger cast (including Vincent Cassel, who seems to play very well on this side of the pond), a better story (with fewer plot holes), a cracking script, and a sense of outright weird that it shares with the similarly wonderful Calvaire, went straight to DVD in the States. It's a question I may never be able to answer. But I'm glad we at least got a DVD release; most Americans are still waiting to get their hands on, say, Jaime Balaguero's [REC] as I write this. In any case, Sheitan (and Calvaire, the film I will spend most of this review comparing with it) has a weirdness about it I'm not sure I've seen since Deliverance. And I highly recommend it for anyone who found Deliverance in any way enjoyable, and for much the same reasons.
The plot: three friends, Bart (Olivier Bartelemy), Thai (Nico le Phat Tan), and Ladj (Ladj Ly), are clubbing in Paris when they meet some lovely young women. Soon after, Bart gets into a fistfight and is unceremoniously thrown out. Eve (Roxane Mesquida), still looking to party, suggests they all head out to her parents' house in the country. (The parents are, of course, away.) On the way, they run into Eve's parents' caretaker, Joseph (Vincent Cassel), who seems to be not all there, but harmless. As the weekend progresses, the three friends, but especially Bart, realizes that all is not what it seems; while the other two have each glommed onto one of the girls, Bart finds himself the object of Joseph's affection. He feels less distressed about this, however, upon meeting Joseph's jaw-droppingly beautiful daughter Jeanne (Julie-Marie Parmentier), but he still mostly has eves for Eve, who leads him on while at the same time flirting with Thai.
Has the plot of a weird romantic comedy, doesn't it? Trust me, it's a horror film in the same way Audition is a horror film; it really is a weird romantic comedy, but everything eventually explodes. And while the final fifteen minutes of Sheitan doesn't have the same stomach-churning power as do the final fifteen of Miike's magnum opus, believe me, things take as many turns for the worse as they possibly can. This is Chapeion's first feature film, but his debut short also used Cassel and Bartelemy, and he knows how to use them to best effect; he certainly does here.
The more Vincent Cassel films I see, the more impressed I am with his acting. He breaks away from his usual tough-guy role here to play a happy-go-lucky, somewhat mentally vacant rube, and he does it wonderfully. In many ways, it brought to mind Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?. Cassel's resume is somewhat less wide-ranging than DiCaprio's was at the time, and so it seems even more a departure; he pulls it off with aplomb. Bartelemy doesn't have nearly as much work to do playing the clueless party animal, but he really makes his character's confusion and fumbled attempts to think quickly work. The rest of the cast are almost as good. The script is sharp and witty, never revealing too much of itself for the sake of a cheap thrill. I could go on pointing out things about this movie that make it worth watching, but by the time I was done, you'd have spent longer reading the review than you will watching the ninety-four-minute movie. As long as your idea of horror doesn't end with Hostel (or I Walked with a Zombie), Sheitan is a winner through and through. ****
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Derivative Nonsense, August 12, 2009
Mild Spoiler Alert.
I've learned that anytime Maxim magazine reviewer Pete Hammond or "Ain't It Cool News" gives anything a rave, you can bet it's gonna suck. That's the case here. There's nothing satisfying about this film; in fact, I was sorely disappointed that our hapless young'uns aren't slaughtered in outlandishly gruesome ways given that all three male protagonists are reprehensible twits. The only decent character, Yasmine, is last seen running after her friend's car--the driver doesn't bother to rescue his love interest and instead kicks another friend out of the vehicle and takes off to save his own cheatin' butt! (We're supposed to care about these characters?!) Illogical plot, howl-worthy dialogue, and a cross-dressing "wife" equal one-and-half hours of your life you'd be better off spending on...well...pretty much anything else.
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