Satan

I really enjoyed this film when I saw the showing at FrightFest '06. Although not a "great movie" in the traditional sense it is absolutely hilarious!

Take human traffic and add a splash of the family from House of a 1000 corpses and then you have this film! ! ! I can honestly say that this film is worth watching just for the relationship between Joseph and Bart. If you want to watch a film with some messed up characters and truly funny scenes with a horror undertone then watch this mad French movie!

P.s. Watch for the "Red Rocket" scene in the grotto, anyone that has seen South Park should get that ! ! !

French shocker Sheitan is, against all odds and expectations, some kind of demented - and utterly disreputable - masterpiece: the scariest, most uninhibited movie of the year, and also perhaps the funniest.

It's by some way the best picture I've seen since A History of Violence: I was really blown away by its punkish energy, unpredictability and confidence; most of all, I loved the way director Kim Chapiron (who I'd never heard of before) mixes horror and humour. So many movies try that balancing-act and come a cropper: Chapiron makes it look easy. She (or is it a he?) also puts the wildly overpraised Haut Tension and Calvaire very firmly in their place: Sheitan resembles both pictures in many ways, but is much their superior in terms of ambition, execution and sheer balls-to-the-wall chutzpah.

It's a picture I knew nothing about before arriving in Amsterdam (for the Fantastic Film Festival) and spotting it in the catalogue: the presence in the cast of Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci caught my eye, but I went in fearing the worst - anticipated a flashily hollow exercise in exploitational style a la Jan Kounen's dire Dobermann (Kounen is, as it turns out, thanked in the end credits), reckoned I might well exit after 30 minutes if it didn't grab my attention. New after five minutes I was going to be in my seat for the duration: hyperkinetic nightclub opening sets the tone/pace/look (much hand-held camera-work, rapidfire editing, up-close-and-personal shots of the youthful protagonists).

Main characters are three pals of varying degrees of boorishness: Olivier Barthelemy as knucklehead Bart, who rapidly gets into a daft dancefloor fight and is smashed over the head with a wine bottle; Ladj Ly and Nicolas Le Phat Tan as Thai - this latter pair relatively sensible and restrained in comparison with their lecherous, thuggish mate. When Bart is ejected from the premises, the trio head off (at reckless speed) in Ladj's car, along with barmaid Yasmine (Leila Bekhti) and another copine, Eve (Roxane Mesquida). After careering through the city streets, the five (accompanied by Bart's dog Tyson) head for the countryside and the farmhouse where Eve's parents supposedly reside. No sign of the folks: instead it's maniacally grinning farmhand/housekeeper Joseph (a near-unrecognisable Vincent Cassel) who provides an extremely hearty welcome. It doesn't take too long for all hell to break loose - perhaps literally, 'Sheitan' being the Persian word for Satan...

Like most of the best films, the less you know about Sheitan beforehand, the better: and any synopsis can't really hope to capture what makes the picture so exhilaratingly effective. Best seen in a crowded cinema - ideally after a drink or two - this is a genuinely disturbing, genuinely hilarious rock-the-house crowdpleaser. Too extreme and jittery for some, no doubt - but how terrific it is to stumble across a film bursting with so much wildness and life. A no-holds-barred rural Gothic: touches of Jeepers Creepers here and there, a bit of Cabin Fever - with Barthelemy's Bart a Gallic cousin of James DeBello's pricelessly doltish Bert from the latter.

And while Chapiron's direction and script (co-written with Christian Chapiron) are, of course, crucial, special mention must be made of Barthelemy, without whom Sheitan might not even work at all. His performance as the hapless Bart - whose sullen idiocy is punished in truly extravagant style - represents astonishing work. Bart is notably unintelligent, relentlessly unsympathetic: unredeemed and very probably unredeemable - a considerable challenge for any actor, never mind one making his first feature-film. But in Barthelemy's hands he becomes a compelling, utterly convincing three-dimensional creation - a startling intrusion of cloddish reality into what is otherwise a mind-bending journey into the surreal and the grotesque.

an excellent movie, but I think it has been misunderstood for the most part because it's full of references from ancient short movies from the collective kourtrajmé. IT has to be taken with second and maybe third degrees it's so funny and it's maybe vincent cassel's best performance. "on va aux grottes chaudes" will become cult. thank you Kim for that refreshing movie, I know you will be great in the future. kourtrajmé is an idea which didn't exist in France and allows to discover an other facet of french humour. It's a friends movie but you can see all the fun of this movie. it's so easy to criticize an original movie when you can't understand it. I think the world wasn't ready for Sheitan but I hope it will be soon because it's a pearl.

If you took the movies The Devil's Rejects, The Hills Have Eyes, Rosemary's Baby, and Psycho, and then stuck them in a blender, your end result just might be Sheitan, the second film from French Director Kim Chapiron.

The film revolves mostly around three men, who after a night of partying at the local discotheque, meet up with a young girl named Eve. Eve encourages the three friends (plus a girlfriend of the three men) to come to the countryside, to stay at her house. Shortly before arriving at the house the characters meet up with Joseph, the supremely creepy housekeeper to the rundown manor (played by French actor Vincent Cassel), where Eve lives. A very minimalist plot, but if this were a Hollywood movie, the housekeeper would have brutally murdered the guests one by one, and this would have been your run of the mill slasher flick.. But this is not a Hollywood movie, and it's not a slasher flick, and this is what makes Sheitan so refreshingly different. The film instead elects to take the viewer on a different path, which turns out to be infinitely more disturbing. Instead of becoming a blood bath, Sheitan starts out quite normally, but at the same time the viewer is left with the thought in the back of their head, "What is wrong with these people." From then on the film seamlessly balances black humor with a genuine creepiness, which continues up to the very end, and then brace yourself. The film closes with an extremely disturbing 15 minutes or so, of family dysfunction on a grand level.

The acting isn't especially well done, but is adequate for the story. The cinematography is pretty straight forward and typical, although the opening features some Mtv inspired, fast paced camera work, but the film still works well regardless of these two-weaknesses.

The only real weakness the film has, is as the credits roll, the viewer is still left with a lot of un-answered questions. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite films have open-ended conclusions, but in Sheitan, some of the unanswered questions involve major plot points, and undoubtedly some viewers will be frustrated by this.

All in all, the film works quite well. If you're a fun of twisted, strange, disturbing movies, Sheitan is for you, if demented films aren't your thing avoid it, and go rent Bambi instead.

My rating 8 out of 10. (Truly different story, with a horrific ending, but too much Ambiguity )

This movie was hilarious! I loved the characters in this film all with their own goofy, perverted and dumbass college aged personalities. It seemed to me that I laughed throughout most of the film but there was still enough gore and horror to keep me interested in the horror side of it.

Another thing I can say about this movie was there was a lot of "WTF!" moments. I also have to add that this movie has the nastiest description of a woman's private parts I have ever heard and still shake my head in disgust and amusement at it even days later.

I don't want to go into it too much but this movie has become high up on my list for movies I would recommend to people. It is politically incorrect and has constant references to racism, but its more to add to the uneducated hillbilly type character that plays in the movie.

If you haven't seen this, watch it. It is one of the funniest horror films I have ever seen.

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