Monsieur Cauchemar

Jean -Pierre Mocky is an acquired taste ; this is (very) low budget works, goofy, sometimes coarse, cynical , but terribly different from everything which is made in the French cinema.

Based on a detective story by Pierre Siniac , the screeenplay is teeming with nods at Sherlock Holmes' foggy streets , Agatha Christie 's "and then there were none" (the statuettes) , Clouzot/Steeman's "l'assassin habite au 21" (the "solution") ;and in the criminal bookseller's store, one asks for Edgar Wallace's novels .

But all these hints are not to be taken seriously ;so much for the prologue : at the circus, a ballerina ,surrounded by clowns ,performs her last dance before being arrested for drug trafficking .Ten years after, one of the clowns , convinced she was given away to the police by one of his colleagues , decides to do away with them ,one by one, when the town is shrouded in fog .He becomes Monsieur Cauchemar .(=Mr Nightmare)

He 's admired by a teenager whose daddy was guillotined ; and what makes the matters worse , his widow has married the cop who arrested him .(Hamlet in miniature)

All is crazy in this spoof on thrillers : fake fog , a dwarf as a newspaper boy,the police on strike , a stammerer who sings "Minuit Chrétiens" (o Holy night) a la Josh Grosban , a music which apes Anton Karas ' "the third man" theme , a teenager who puts sleeping drug in his stepdad -cop's coffee , you name it....

This is Jean-Pierre Mocky.