Grimmfest 2018 - Girls With Balls

Director: Olivier Afonso

Cast: Denis Lavant, Manon Azem, Dany Verissimo-Petit, Anne-Solenne Hatte, Camille Razat, Louise Blachère, Victor Artus Solaro, Tiphaine Daviot, Margot Dufrene

Synopsis: All girl volleyball team The Falcons end up stranded in the middle of nowhere after their mini-van breaks down. Little do they know they have landed in degenerate hunters' territory and the hunt is on. But the girls are more resourceful than it appears. In the heart of the forest, the tables are about to turn between hunter and hunted...

Grimmfest say: You'd think people in movies would have learned not to follow crude hand-painted "Diversion" sign off the main road and into the woods by now, wouldn't you? Sure, this is rural France, not the Appalachians, but insane cannibal hillbillies are the same the world over. Referencing such recent Gallic bloodbaths as Frontier(s) and The Pack, but plundering and parodying the backwoods hunter-killer tropes in general, this broad, bawdy, bloody black comedy offers a slyly feminist reinvention of the perennially-popular "Cheerleaders in peril" scenario of countless catchpenny 80s slasher movies. Boasting a strong message of female empowerment and sisterhood, it's a real crowd-pleaser, with the talented, young, and mainly female cast proving more than a match for French cinema legend, and inveterate scene-stealer, Denis Lavant's leering cannibal patriarch, Gooooooo, Falcons!

What I'm Expecting: What I hope to see here is the quintessential cannibal hillbillies type film, but one in which the tables turn very quickly and the girls prove to be equally as vicious as their would-be attackers.

A cross between Severance and Tucker and Dale vs Evil is perhaps the best way to explain what I have in mind for this film.

However, I would hope Girls With Balls would go that bit further and completely smash the genre tropes, maybe even do a role reversal; having the girls themselves being portrayed as the villains. And of course, the film needs to be full of female empowerment and feminist qualities: I do not expect to see these girls running and screaming in hapless panic. The days of women playing helpless victims and being in need of rescue are, thankfully, over.