0 out of 10
 

Eight Women, Zero Quality

Truly A Film To Eight

Ever wondered why Hollywood is so big and powerful, whilst France has the oldest motion picture industry in the world and effectively had a 20 year head start on the Yankies? Eight Women, a flick of a quality, in a league of its own, goes a long way to explaining this anomaly.

Without doubt, one of the cheapest flicks ever made, it has just 3 crummy interior sets and some laughable phony snow (the flakes are circular) to portray a country house murder in the same style as Agatha Christie, and makes the average homemade porno video look like the work of Steven Spielberg. With acting more cardboard than it's wobbly sets and suitable at best to a 1925 silent movie, it has as much credibility as an official statement by Tony Blair. Indeed, it is ironic when Catherine Deneuve complains in the opening scenes that her sister is ugly, when at her time of life, she has cracks in her face that could rival the San Andreas fault.

Based on a stage play written by Rob Thomas, a pensioner pervert from Paris who is famous for a string of tacky porno flicks set in nudist camps and Thailand Brothels, it has in no way been adapted to the big screen. Backed by a production team and cast who must have truly burnt the midnight oil and worked long hours to have churned out such utter tripe, no aspect of it, not the acting, lighting nor direction, is worth so much of a nickel of credit.

The story revolves around a wealthy industrialist who is found murdered, although one suspects from the start, that the actor must have hired his own hitman to escape such a lead sinker of a movie and leave with at least some distant chance of doing in a soap commercials in the future. As his body lies still warm in its bed, the six members of the family and the two servant girls prance around, breaking into truly forgettable songs, usually about getting laid, that barge back the limits of bad taste superlatives. With any chance of getting help gone, either for the stranded women or for the stranded audience - the phone lines have been cut the way the funding to this tosh should have been and the car has been sabotaged in a similar manner to the plot - the celluloid seems to crawl along like a snail for nearly two damn hours. Even the promised scene we all pray for, namely the word 'FIN' displayed on a black screen isn't reached without creepy 70 year old Rob Thomas getting his jollies off by writing in a bad bout of lesbian hardcore between a couple of sad old wrinkly biddies rolling around on the floor.

With everyone apparently shagging the servants as a perk, rampant incest and the entire cast spending most of their time screaming abuse in an unintelligible gabble at each other, one has to ask is this a realistic portrayal of the average family in France? Interestingly enough, during the Napoleonic Wars, the people of Sunderland in the North of England found a chimpanzee wandering around on the beach dressed in a cute uniform and subsequently hung it as a Frenchman there to spy on the military. It's films like "Eight Women" that certainly serve well to show how such a mistake is so easy to make.