2634. Girls With Balls (2018)

Starring: Anne-Solenne Hatte, Louise Blachère, Manon Azem

Director: Olivier Afonso

Running Time: 77 mins

Girls With Balls is a French film about a top volleyball team who find themselves fighting for their lives after getting lost in the woods where a troop of demented men begin to hunt them.

Although it’s perhaps not so bad on terms of raw production quality, Girls With Balls has to be one of the worst films I’ve seen in a very long time. With a hateful, screechy and painfully irritating plot, the film gets more and more unbearable as it goes along, taking a basic, easy-going parody of your average slasher and turning into just over an hour of pure pain.

With no redeeming qualities bar its budget, Girls With Balls fails to make you laugh at every single turn, worsened by non-sensical threat from a bunch of appalling excuses for villains, as well as excessively gory violence, terrible action cinematography and frenetic editing in every single scene.

So, I think it’s clear just how much I hated Girls With Balls, and before getting into what is likely to be a pure rant rather than a review, I think it suffices to say that this film will never be worth your time, and the sooner you forget about ever watching it the better.

First up, the story. You might be thinking that, as somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek parody, there’s no need to really take this movie seriously, but I can assure you that even by expecting the most basic storytelling from this movie, you’ll be both sorely disappointed, and even more annoyed.

Above all, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the film had some laughs to it, but seeing as every pathetic attempt at comedy falls flat harder than a slab of concrete, the onus falls onto the plot to at least keep you engaged.

However, with that simple premise of a bunch of volleyball players in skimpy uniforms being viciously hunted by the woods by a troop of psychos, there is absolutely nothing more to see from this film. It has no interesting twists, nor a single moment of tension, and every single one of its characters – even the moderately tolerable ones – have no consistency whatsoever to speak of.

That leaves you as the viewer stuck in the woods with a bunch of random girls that you can’t ever really support, partly because they’re so unlikable or uninteresting that you don’t want to spend time with them, but mainly because they change personality wildly throughout, leaving you none the wiser as you attempt to form even the slightest bit of a connection with them.

Worse than the story, however, has to be the film’s awful take on action and horror. Again, if there were even a few laughs to be seen, I wouldn’t take this so seriously, but the horror is so gory, and often so sinister that it makes for a deeply unpleasant viewing experience.

It’s one thing to call something a throwaway parody movie, but it’s totally different when the film is portraying such excessive violence and unnecessarily dark horror, with the presence of the troop of men hunting the girls proving far, far too dark for its own good.

And as for the odd fight or shootout scene, I’ve seen few films that are so trigger happy on the shaky cam and quick editing. Great action movies inject energy through both of these techniques, but Girls With Balls goes way, way over the top with its fervour for intense and insane action.

So not only is it nearly impossible to make out what’s happening on screen due to the shaky cam, but even in the most basic dialogue scenes as well as action sequences does the ridiculous amount of editing make the story impossible to follow.

Sure, there’s a bit of budget in this movie, and the production values aren’t all that bad, but every artistic or technical choice it makes turns the whole affair into something genuinely unbearable, ending up as just over an hour of painful, shrill, irritating, sinister, boring, stupid, pointless and ultimately hateful rubbish, and that’s why I’m giving Girls With Balls a 1.0.