Shlock cinema with a "message". So original...

Rating: Null/10 (29 November 2019)

If you decide to watch this silly nonsense, do yourself a favour and skip directly to the 50-minute mark, roughly. That's where the movie starts. No joke.
The first 50 minutes are "character development", which is fairly odd considering there is no time to develop/introduce 15-20 characters in the space of a mere movie, much less a horror flick. Suffice it to say, the first 10 minutes consist almost entirely of monotonous "VHS" interviews with (mostly) airhead dancers, after which we get tortured with a bloody silly 5-minute musical number(!), this in turn being followed by 30 minutes of random and brief conversations between the extremely dim-witted low-life characters. This segment includes yet another utterly pointless lengthy musical number. Needless to say, I fast-forwarded that too.
Then the violence erupts. Apparently, someone spiked the alcohol with LSD - although I suspect it's more likely to be the notorious "New Extreme French Cinema" drug - and all hell breaks loose. But because this isn't an American movie, the violence is generally perpetrated by blacks, with usually whites as their victims. It's hard to say whether this was intentional though, especially because so much of the movie seems random and improvised. (At one point the camera turns upside-down, and stays that way for a long time, and I wouldn't necessarily bet that this was planned either.) If Americans or Brits had made the same movie (I know, very difficult to imagine them producing something so intrinsically French as this cuckoo-for-caca drivel), the blacks would be victims of white violence: it's pathetic how each region/country/culture has its own (hidden) political/social agenda; nobody is innocent anymore, and everyone wants to preach and teach, rarely to entertain. Bias bias bias everywhere: there is racism among racists and "anti-racists" alike. Nevertheless, there is no obvious or at least central racial agenda or theme here, aside from one of the black dancers shouting "you white pigs!" while severely beating a white dancer.
I am convinced hipster cinemaphiles love this flick though. Aside from the fact that it tackles some of their favourite subjects such as insanity, drug use, incest, anti-social behavior, masturbation, homosexuality, weirdness, and extreme violence, it is an unusually (read: stupidly) structured film which is to their liking. It's very much fringe cinema (though nothing remotely as extreme as the depraved 70s underground cult scene), and to a hipster fringe cinema can do no wrong, just as commercial cinema can do no right. (Hipsters have strict rules which they must abide by, otherwise they risk losing credibility with their militant peers. This goes for music too, and perhaps even hats and coffee.)
The plot, despite the "elaborate" i.e. arty set-up, is very basic. It is even more primitive than some zombie movies. I specifically mention those because this essentially plays out like a zombie flick: the difference being that people aren't bitten/infected but high on drugs. The effects are very similar though: total barbarism and random violence. I guess this is why the film-maker decided on such an odd structure, because he perhaps felt that the story was so ultra-simplistic that the film required additional "decoration", something to impress the art-crowd with. Correction: the bloody-thirsty art-crowd...
Yet, this pretentious decision to over-decorate is more-or-less why the movie fails. Wasting FIFTY minutes of screen-time, i.e. more than half the movie, on superficial/dull banter involving very dull nitwits makes it impossible for me give the film a rating better than 3/10. I had to fast-forward large chunks of the movie, so it's a wonder the film gets even that much from me.
Naturally, the movie has no point to make, at least not any new or intelligent point - despite what hipsters might claim. I haven't read any reviews, but they probably believe that the film makes some "powerful statement about our inherent barbarism" or some such pretentious laughable malarkey. Although, to be fair, this is mostly true: give idiots half a chance, and they will become violent. Nevertheless, hipsters being staunchly left-wing would mean they contradict themselves and their idol Marx if they adopted the view that humans are still essentially easily manipulated savages with an intrinsically evil essence. After all, don't (millennial) hipsters foster the illusion that they are so much smarter and more evolved than older generations? Don't these "trendy" young dancers qualify as "evolved, hip, and smart" to hipsters? Doesn't Marx elevate humans to an almost god-like status? (No, wait, that highly optimistic "great and sudden evolution" comes AFTER the great overthrow of evil capitalism, according to the pompous 19th-century couch philosopher...)
The director tries hard to give this shock-cinema "art-house" nonsense a stamp of intellectual credibility - through the use of cheesy quasi-intellectual captions - but whoever falls for that lame fortune-cookie "trick" only has their own gullibility to blame. This film is just an excuse to create train-wreck situations for thrill-seeking blood-thirsty film buffs. Most of these film buffs are completely unaware of this thirst for blood in themselves, and those who are justify their interest in it by treating the quasi-intellectual captions as poignant rather than laughable, thereby allowing such movies to get away with murder - simply on the pretext that "it's all symbolism anyway".
Yeah, sure it is.