Raw
Still in search of a good horror movie. The trailer showed some gruesome promise, the reviews were generally good.
Raw is a French entry in the genre. Meme les francais font de mauvais films. Pourquoi la bonne horreur est-elle si difficile?
The basic storyline:
Sixteen year old Justine heads to universite to be a veterinarian like her mom and dad. She's the good student, the promised one, the brilliant child. Her sister is already there a year or two ahead. The entire family are strict vegetarians, a fact established in a silly and overlong restaurant scene.
During the first week or so, the new vet students are relentlessly hazed by the upper classmen. Who knew hell week was a thing for French vets to be? Justine finds her sister at a rave-type party on the first night during a far-too-long hazing scene and it's pretty apparent that big sis Alexa is not quite in control. She's definitely not meek and studious like her baby sister.
As part of a one of the near constant hazing scenes, Justine the vegetarian veterinarian is forced to eat a piece of rabbit kidney.
Things go off the rails after that. Justine finds out she likes meat. Raw. Thus the title.
During an uncomfortable bikini waxing scene (one that featured a dog twice sniffing Justine's crotch in sequences that appeared to be unscripted and just left in for no reason) little Justine gives in to her newly formed taste by snacking on a finger sandwich.
Despite the gushing reviews that called this film groundbreaking, genre-defining and other superlatives, nothing that happens in this film hasn't been done elsewhere and in many cases done better. The series Zombie is a much more clever take on this whole concept.
The film was badly cut in the editing room. There were random scene threads that simply didn't go anywhere or mean anything. One in particular dealt with the question of who was cheating on a vet paper. There was no point to include that scene, it had no correlation to anything else in the movie. The pacing was terrible. And there were so many things that just didn't make any sense at all. No way would any universite allow much of the behavior on display.
It was a French film so there were some weird components like underarm hair, a random boobs popping out, people wandering around in panties and cutoff shirts, etc. And a sorta gay dude with another rabbit hole side story.
French movies are awful.