THE MEAT MAN COMETH: “BULLHEAD”

Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts of The Pack) is a hulking cattle farmer who has grown up able to relate to his animals more than the people around him. That’s not to say he’s an animal lover; he routinely pumps his stock full of illegal hormones that he gets through the extensive black market his family has been involved with since the generation before, in an effort to fatten them up quicker and make the big bucks faster. An intimidating figure surrounded by sleazy gangsters and unconscientious meat-men, Jacky is not living the quiet life usually associated with stockmen: his is a fast-paced world full of shady deals and clandestine activities not limited to the meat-trade – there’s also a stolen car racket, an adolescent smut mag racket and even a human hormone underground – the latter being the one Jacky viagra now benefits from most personally.

But when the murder of a policeman who has been closing in on the hormone mafia brings all these threads together with Jacky at the center, he finds himself us discount viagra overnight delivery face to face with painful memories from his past that are more devastating than anything a police raid will bring down on him. With an overload of artificial testosterone regularly running through his system, Jacky is a walking time-bomb far removed from the wide-eyed, scrawny kid he once was. But to characterize Bullhead as a crime film would be misleading. The power of this film sneaks up on you; as little bits of information are revealed concerning the characters’ relationships with one another, a horrifying picture of lifelong trauma emerges. Suddenly everything makes sense.

The first feature from writer/director Michaël Roskam is both a genre-bender and a gender-bender; what starts off as a depiction of alienating machismo becomes an empathic portrait of cialis generic drug a man fighting against psychological wounds that no amount of injected testosterone can fix.

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BULLHEAD has its North American Premiere on July 15th at 9:20 pm and screens again on July 20th at 5:20pm, both in the Salle JA DeSeve. More info on the film page HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2020.

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