La Cité de la peur (une comédie familiale)

The team behind the hugely successful comic group ‘Les Nuls’ (roughly translated as ‘The Lameos’), who rose to fame on French TV in the late 80s/early 90s turn their hand to the big screen in this riotous spoof of the horror and action genre.

Chantal Lauby plays Odile Deray, a publicist for an atrociously bad horror movie called ‘Red is Dead’. Following its premiere at Cannes, the film becomes a sensation as the projectionists, after each showing, are continuously murdered in a copy cat of the film itself - by a hooded stranger with a hammer and sickle. Odile hires the larger than life skirt-chasing security guard with diarrhoeic issues, Serge Karamazov (Alain Chabat) to protect the film’s infantile and portly star, who vomits when happy, Simon Jérémi (Dominique Farrugia).

Movie parodies (Basic Instinct, The Terminator etc) and cameos (including James Cameron and Rosanna Arquette) abound in this ambitious comedy which relies as much on wordplay as it does physical farce and outlandish plot lines. Add to that (now) cult performances by some of France’s best comedians and soon enough you’ll realise the term ‘laugh out loud’ was coined for this kind of film.