La cité de la peur (1994)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1994
	Director: Alain Berbérian (Le Boulet, Paparazzi)
	Actors: Chantal Lauby, Alain Chabat, Dominique Farrugia
	Country: F
	Genre: Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: 26.05.2019, DVD, 42" TV screen.
Synopsis: At the margin of the international film festival of Cannes, the projectionists of a cheap horror movie Red is Dead are killed in series. To surf on the wave of popularity, the press secretary Odile Deray (Lauby) invites the lead actor Simon Jeremy (Farrugia) to the next projections, but safely un der the protection of Serge Karamazov (Chabat).
Review: Like other French comedies (for example the recently reviewed La Classe Américaine - Le Grand Détournement), I always wonder if this kind of movie can be appreciated by people of any other country. Released in 1994, it was the pinnacle in the career of the Comedy troop Les Nuls which was extremely popular at that time among the audience of the encrypted channel CANAL+ (I didn't have it at the time so I discovered them via friends or later VHS tape and internet). I was around 18 when I first saw it on TV and immediately loved it. It was a time when I was a big fan of the American ZAZ parodies like Airplane, The Naked Gun, ... and their sequels. La cité de la peur was the same but made by French people for French people. Indeed Les Nuls used to be responsible for the translation of the jokes in the ZAZ movies which made the French version funny too. I have watched the movie countless times and at some point was using its dialogs ridiculously often. This sounds weird but I was definitely not the only one, like I learned watching the episode 56 of the short TV-series Bref entitled J'ai grandi dans les années 90. It felt so weird watching the movie again after 10-15 years without... in particular because I still remembered all the dialogs... and was not the only one of my friends in the room to do so. Together we could even find funny details we had never seen before. I realize I haven't even told why is the movie funny. There are exact parodies of scenes like the famous one in Basic Instinct, but the allusions are usually more subtle (contrarily to the ZAZ productions or the recent parodies like Superhero Movie) and instead of referring to a particular movie, copy a genre (car chase, serial killer, thriller, romantic comedy...) in exaggeration and with humor. Subtle details include shooting his gun in the air in frustration like in Point Break, which will be again parodied in the excellent Hot Fuzz. The movie has aged (my god it is already 25 years old!) but it still makes me laugh, a lot. I wonder if one day it won't anymore. Meanwhile, will you have a whisky or just a finger?
Rating: 8 /10