HOT DAMN. Another great, vicious French horror film–not quite as smart, polished, and riveting as Ils/Them which I reviewed a little while back, but it is still sharply-shot, often unnerving, and about 10,000 times gorier.
The plot: a pregnant woman who recently lost her husband (how careless!) is being assaulted in her home late one Christmas eve by a profoundly freaky Beatrice Dalle (the Betty Blue), who wants to give her a Caesarean. Or, more precisely, wants the baby for herself, and plans to get it expeditiously, using whatever comes to hand.
I’m likely the only person who posts here who would love a film so unrepentantly gory, but maybe it might attract fans of stylish, audacious filmmaking; its qualities are not merely the repulsive but the perverse seductive beauties of such gore, and every shot is lovingly framed, the colors are vibrant, the use of shadow and haze outstanding. The directors rival Takashi Miike in their ability to yoke a vibrant, joyous aesthetic sensibility to such literally pulpy, vigorously vicious material.