Quicklinks
Top Links
trailers and videosfull cast and crewtriviaofficial sitesmemorable quotesOverview
main detailscombined detailsfull cast and crewcompany creditsAwards & Reviews
user reviewsexternal reviewsawardsuser ratingsparents guidemessage boardPlot & Quotes
plot summarysynopsisplot keywordsmemorable quotesDid You Know?
triviagoofssoundtrack listingcrazy creditsalternate versionsmovie connectionsFAQOther Info
box office/businessrelease datesfilming locationstechnical specsliterature listingsNewsDeskPromotional
taglines trailers and videos posters photo galleryExternal Links
showtimesofficial sitesmiscellaneousphotographssound clipsvideo clipsReviews & Ratings for
Themroc More at IMDbPro »
| Page 1 of 2: | [1] [2] ![[Next]](http://i.media-imdb.com/f86.gif){kind=small} |
| Index | 18 reviews in total |
29 out of 38 people found the following review useful:
Anarchist assault, 17 August 2003
Author:
robtclements from Sydney, Australia
In a time when blind respect for anyone with the arrogance to call themselves an authority has reached plague proportions, we need to rediscover Claude Faraldo's anarchist assault Themroc as a matter of extreme urgency. Whether as a surrealistic revenge fantasy that makes Dirty Harry look like Kindergarden Cop or simply as one of the funniest films ever made, the film takes nothing seriously (least of all itself) as it sets out to outrage every convention of decent law abiding filmmaking ever unwritten. It's hard to choose just one pristine moment to symbolise this work - peraps the gendarme's blind pride in the stupidity of his uniform just before he becomes Themroc's latest meal; or possibly Michel Piccoli's curious assistance in his own death as his cave family are carefully walled in - but the work is blistering in its uncompromising joyous anti-logic. Commercial traditionalists like Bunuel may have made newer - even angrier - statements; but noone has ever revelled in their own extremism than Faraldo. The sooner it turns up on DVD, the better.
20 out of 26 people found the following review useful:
They don't make them like this anymore, 20 July 1999
Author:
matthew-54 from London
A great film. Woefully cheap. Blissfully purposeful. Knows exactly what it thinks and says it with brutal clarity and biting humour, all shot in a ragged verité style that seems strangely contemporary. A factory worker goes off his trolley, throws society's rulebook out of the window and reverts to being a caveman. And that's about it - talk about a high concept! There's no dialogue, only gibberish and grunts, but, incredibly, it works. It's easy not to like this film, but hard not to be impressed by it. Check it out for yourself and see.
9 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
amazing, one of a kind, 31 October 2007
Author:
joethelilman from london
a film which is so different in one of the best ways ever... a breath of fresh air, made just after riots in Paris in the 70's the film uses sexual tensions to portray the suppressed feeling of most parisians at the time. themroc himself, is a man who lives a repetitive life, constantly dealing with the everyday struggles of work and no play, breaks from his neash to turn in to a free man/monster who breaks down all barriers(quite literally) and brings a feeling of liberty to his community despite the police trying their best to stop and ever kill him. his path brings sex, demolition, canabolism, adultery, incest and murder to name a few... all with only about 20words said throughout the who thing a film for every film lover to watch. seriously recommended
8 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt ..., 27 December 2006
Author:
unruhlee from Oakland, California
This film is hilarious. It is inspiring. It captures the absurdity of
everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious
poetic revolt of one man who "goes mad" against authority in every
form.
It's interesting that the strategy of liberation in the film revolves
around a very personal and playful attack on the architecture most
immediate to our lives. This destruction and transformation of space is
accompanied by a kind of sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois family
dynamics in a contagious way. Readers may recognize the resonance of
these themes with the theory and agitation of the Situationist
International, the revolutionary / avant-garde organization credited
with sparking the revolt of May 1968 in France. Five years previous to
Themroc's release, millions of people actually did occupy public spaces
including universities and factories, creating "passionally superior
ambiances" in many cases, armed to a significant extent with
Situationist ideas, graffiti slogans from which plastered Paris.
Not that seeing Themroc is any substitute for actively engaging the
rigorous revolutionary theory of the S.I. (see www.bopsecrets.org). But
the film is in a way a dream-like rendition of the Situationist vision
of changing life. And in fact, there is a passing reference to Themroc
in "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", a film by Situationist René Vienet:
when the hero of that film is confronting the "bureaucrats", some
onlookers comment something to the effect that "wow, that guy must have
seen Themroc."
12 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
An amusing, surreal, relentless satirical swipe at the banality of the rat race, 5 January 2001
Author:
Afracious from England
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
The excellent Michel Piccoli (La Grande Bouffe; The Phantom of Liberty)
plays Themroc. Themroc lives with his mother and sister in a depressing
flat, where the monotonous silence is only broken by a cuckoo clock.
Themroc's day begins with a bicycle ride to the railway station, then a
train ride to his workplace.
At his works, Themroc goes into a locker room with the other men. They then
split into two groups; one group wearing white overalls, the other wearing
yellow. Each overall has an image of a man painting on the back. The two
groups then quarrel in gibberish, some even seem to be squabbling with their
lockers.
Work then begins. The men start to paint an iron fence. One of the groups
use white paint, the other uses black (on the same fence.) Which colour
wins? Themroc is then up a ladder, and caught peering through the window at
his boss and secretary. His boss opens the window, and bangs Themroc on his
nose, bloodying it. His boss demands to see him. He waits outside his
office, and watches a man sharpening different coloured pencils. The pencils
are put in two rows, one at the top, one at the bottom. The man sharpens the
pencils from the top line, breaks the tip, then puts them on the bottom
row.
Themroc is fired by his boss. He goes into a toilet cubicle and grunts and
growls loudly, like a mad dog. On his way home he enters a subway station.
He walks down the line into the tunnel, howling at the passing trains.
Themroc arrives home, and is greeted at the door by his sister, who has her
breast showing. He fondles her, and she seems to like it. He then gets a
sledgehammer and knocks a huge hole in the wall of his flat. He throws out
his television and other appliances onto the forecourt below. He enters and
leaves his flat via a rope ladder dangling from the hole. Soon, other
neighbours start to knock holes in their walls too.
The police eventually arrive, some in riot gear. Themroc and his sister
throw anything they can find in the house at them in the forecourt below.
The police throw tear gas cannisters in Themroc's flat, but he soon gets rid
of them; and gleefully throws them back and forth with his neighbours, who
are all now behaving like Themroc.
The police then leave. Themroc manages to capture a policeman at night. He
takes the officer to his flat, and then all the neighbours gather round, and
cook and feast on him; although the carcass shown is amusingly a pig's. A
builder then arrives at, and tries to build a wall over the hole. Themroc
jests with him, and persuades him to kick it down after two layers are
built. Throughout the film a man is polishing his car near the forecourt,
almost oblivious to the proceedings. He now takes a sledgehammer and
destroys his car. Themroc and his neighbours are all groaning loudly. The
incessant banal rat race begins again.
8 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Deeply political and a great commentary on humans and our wester society, 21 November 2006
Author:
(gryspnik@europe.com) from Canada
It is obvious that words, wonderful photography, direction and profound
lessons are not needed in a film in order for it to pass its messages
across to its viewers. Themroc is a movie with no dialogue so that it
can be seen by any human around the world and still understand how
authority has separated us and divided us in order to use us. Themroc
is an ode to symbolism, a prime example of how you can do political
commentary and show to people that freedom is easy to attain and that
half measures is the mean authority uses to control us. More than that,
Themroc examines human sexuality, sexism, exploitation and the
limitations modern society has set for us thus limiting our life
experience and happiness.
I absolutely recommend watching it if you manage to fin this film.
10/10
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
THEMROC (Claude Faraldo, 1973) ***, 20 January 2009
Author:
MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta
This is mainly noted for having no intelligible dialogue throughout: given its considerable length (105 minutes) and essential plotlessness, though, the series of grunts, growls, groans and other gibberish uttered by all the characters involved does become wearying after a while. Nevertheless, it's a good example of the risks that film-makers were willing to take (and generally manage to pull off) during this most creative era in World Cinema; curiously enough, for being virtually a Silent film with barely established characters, this has one of the longest cast lists I've ever seen! THEMROC revolves around a laborer (Michel Piccoli) who goes berserk after getting the sack from work: he sleeps with his sister and destroys his apartment and, after the initial astonishment, his neighbors get the same anarchic bug. This streak of non-conformism also extends to sex (with plenty of non-graphic nudity on display), as Piccoli contrives to elicit uninhibited behavior from many of the females (be they nubile or frustrated) around him – including the secretary, Marilu' Tolo, he had been caught unwittingly peeping on and subsequently seduced. Despite the occasional brutality, police intervention in the matter largely proves ineffectual. Though the point of it all is obscure – unless it's that one needs to revert to some form of primeval state in order to survive the exigencies of the modern world – a handful of situations which crop up are definitely amusing: Piccoli and policeman Patrick Dewaere engaging in a tit-for-tat routine while the latter is rebuilding the façade of his apartment; feeling liberated, a victimized wife tries to assert herself and finally escapes her husband's tyranny through the window when he's not looking; a man spends practically the entire film lovingly washing his car but, then, at the very end he joins in the chaos by nonchalantly taking a sledge-hammer to it. Still, when all is said and done, the best thing about the film is its extraordinary fragmented editing.
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
I feel a cough coming on., 6 January 2008
Author:
ElijahCSkuggs from Happy Land, who lives in a Gumdrop House on Lolly Pop Lane
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
A modern man turning into a caveman, and it's not related to Encino
Man? Count me in. The first time I heard about Themroc it immediately
spoke to me. I find the idea of a person re-evolving back into his
previous state pretty damn cool. And when you see the cover with
Themroc screaming, you know this could be a pretty good movie. Actually
it was a very good movie.
If you haven't read anything about Themroc, the story is about a man
who after years of the same daily routine is changing in a pretty
bizarre way. His day usually starts this way: Wakes up, makes coffee,
sees his mother(?) point at the clock telling him to get a move on,
sees a girl (no idea the relation) naked, walks down his steps always
passing the same attractive woman, rides his bike to work, hits the
work locker room and begins his day. Well, the day starts off the same
but Themroc(?) has this little cough going on, but isn't really a clue
to him getting a cold, but actually the start of him reverting back to
caveman ways. Eventually the cough turns into yells and groans. What
follows is an entertaining look at how this modern caveman interacts
with people and his surroundings.
Going into Themroc I didn't know that much about how the story would
play. I kinda expected a dark film with more violence, but what you
really get is a dark comedy, with more sexual themes than violent ones.
Unfortunately Themroc suffers from repetitiveness. The movie slightly
drags in a few scenes, but since the movie's idea is so unique you're
always expecting something surprising to happen. You do get a few nice
surprises, but you also do feel a sense of repetition. Also the
approach to showing a modern caveman in this manner would cause massive
chaos and would be dealt with in a much more harsh manner. And during
the film I thought to myself a lot that it's pretty unrealistic, but
for the ending to work, it had to go this way. And that's fine with me.
Themroc was well worth the wait. When he's making that change into the
Caveman state, and he's about half way there, so he's groaning/grunting
and yelling, but at the same time he's still attempting to be
civilized. That stuff is pretty damn funny. Overall Themroc is a unique
flick that most movie buffs should check out. It's entertaining, funny,
well-acted and definitely different. If you get the chance to see this
rare gem, check it out.
0 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
A great image of our tragic state of life, 17 August 2010
Author:
molllev from Netherlands
I wonder why none of the reviews are attending us on that unforgettable, tragic last pictures of the movie: a deadly frozen world, their arms in vain stretched outside through the gaps in the prisoning wall; in silence lost screaming by human beings whose irrealism did not succeed in their hopeful but anarchistic fighting for an authentic natural life; caught back worse than ever before in a senseless but common life: our daily world without real communicative language. The movie is a great piece of art, a forceful protest, biting but humorous as well, against an inhumane way of one-dimensional existing. Yes, in the spirit of those years, the seventies (Marcuse!); but transcending that time in deeply moving images, a huge everlasting metaphor of human existence in a world of scattered hope for Sense and Quality.
5 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Testing the power of Themroc, 3 June 2007
Author:
j-b-w-1 from United Kingdom
Themroc has been dumped on the market in the North West of England. The
Warner Brothers VHS tape has appeared in dozens of copies in bargain
outlets. So have Buñuel's Tristana and Visconti's Senso, come to that,
but their transformative power may be less potent.
We still await reports that pound-store customers are roasting cops and
sniffing tear-gas for kicks. As for humping their sisters, we never
suspected anything less of them.
Warners promise English subtitles, which would have been de trop.
Collectors of unusual aspect-ratios may care to note it is cited as
1.53:1
It's a romantic tale, though. The modern Themroc would be a short,
stopped by a high- powered bullet about half an hour in.
| Page 1 of 2: | [1] [2] |
Related Links
| Ratings | Awards | External reviews |
| Parents Guide | Plot keywords | Main details |
| Your user reviews | Your vote history |
Copyright © 1990-2012
IMDb.com, Inc.
Terms and Privacy Policy under which this service is provided to you.
An 
company.