Short Review: Folies Meurtrières (1984) by Antoine Pellissier


Throughout the French countryside, a masked maniac with a series of deadly weapons begins killing and carving up the bodies of young women, leading to the question of who they are and what their motive behind the slayings is.

Overall, this was a highly enjoyable and fun genre effort. The fact that, as a straightforward and simplistic display of stalking, slashing, and butchering of various random people that happen upon the killer, this comes off rather well. Merely serving as the loosest framework to introduce victims and offer a suspenseful ambush before the final killing blow, there’s a lot to like here with the gritty old-school setup and camerawork making the attack on the girl in the house, the encounter at the remote quarry or a later scene inside another woman’s house which all come off quite suspenseful. There’s a lot to like with the low-budget style gore on display as well, from the flimsy prosthetics to the stage-blood smeared over everything that all serve to highlight its origins more than anything else.

That said, its ultra-simplistic nature also becomes its undoing since the sheer mindlessness and purely random coincidences are never really given much of any context. Since the whole thing barely has any sound with what seems to be a completely redone soundtrack that eliminates almost all on-screen sound except for sporadic bursts that pop through, the dialogue-free nature of the general appearance of being a series of stalking setpieces ending with a gory death, there’s little about who the killer is, what he’s doing, why he’s targeting the victims or anything like that. It almost feels unfinished more than anything, especially with the lack of sound and the ADR’d nature of the presentation which can be a put-off for some in that mindset but still has moments to like overall.

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