
Foreground, left to right: Arturo, Professor Kung-Fu, Jérémy Morvan and the Pseudonyms, and Gilles Stella
Chroma is a French Web Video series hosted by Karim Debbache acting as the Spiritual Sequel of Crossed, during which Karim once again talks about movies and cinema in general. The series was made between January 2016 and May 2017, each episode focusing on a different movie and delivering a particular message or food for thought about cinema.
Funded popularly on Ulule, Chroma got a budget of a whopping 200,000€, allowing the show to have more special effects and a completely redesigned set, and creating an overarching plot besides the movies each episode is focused on.
Since the plot involves Alternate Universes, here are the characters for the sake of clarity:
- Karim Debbache, the host of the show in universe 1.
- Jérémy Morvan, the sound engineer in universe 1.
- Gilles Stella, the camera operator in universe 1.
- Kamel Debbiche, Karim's counterpart in universe 2 who travels to universe 1.
- Jérémy Morvain, Morvan's counterpart in universe 2 who follows Kamel.
- Gilles Stello, Stella's counterpart in universe 2 who doesn't follow Kamel and Morvain.
- The Loony Mustached Operator, also from universe 2, who does follow them.
The series is complete with 12 episodes:
- Troll 2, an apparently Genre-Busting movie about a family stumbling into a village full of hostile goblins.What's a bad film? What's a good film? What's a film?
- Rollerball (the 2002 remake), an action movie featuring a Dystopia in which an ordinary hero participates in the eponymous sport.All figurative films are political on two different levels.
- Highlander II: The Quickening: the much-reviled sequel of Highlander.A fictional film has a diegesis.
- Signs: the science-fiction movie from M. Night Shyamalan featuring a family living an apparent alien invasion.Films are screens. And we are the projectors.
- Paranormal Activity: a Found Footage movie featuring a couple harassed by a malicious spirit.A good film is a film that effectively uses the tools specific to the moving pictures medium.
- Mac and Me: a ripoff of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.The meaning of a film shouldn't be altered by [censored] pecuniary considerations.
- Vidocq: a French Detective Drama featuring the famous inspector.Just because a film is unpleasant to look at doesn't mean it's a failure.
- Knock Off: a convoluted action movie by Hong-Kong star director Tsui Hark starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.The movies we love say a lot about who we are.
- Silent Night, Deadly Night: a 1984 Slasher Movie where the killer is dressed as Santa.In a film, it's very hard to tell the difference between what's descriptive and what's prescriptive.
- Gremlins (1984): The famous movie from Joe Dante where the eponymous creatures wreak havoc on a suburban town.Cinema is a collective art.
- GoodFellas: The iconic gangster film from Martin Scorsese.All films are linked.
- Carnosaur: A B-horror film about a Mad Scientist who recreates dinosaurs from chickens.Cinema was never born.
After years of speculation and anticipation, Gilles unfortunately confirmed in 2024 that there wouldn't be a second season, primarily because he, Karim and Jérémy no longer live in the same cities and because Karim is no longer comfortable with appearing on camera.
Tropes found in Chroma
- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: Played for Laughs in Episode 3 when Gilles Stello shows the Spetsnaz troops' dodging technique, which involves bending his limbs in impossible positions.
- Absurd Phobia: Karim and Kamel are both terrified of the Garbage Pail Kids, of all things. When Kamel names a few, Karim even begs him to stop before he summons them.
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Karim saw Knock Off so many times on DVD that he describes the DVD as "sharp as a fucking razor". When thrown, it can slice through someone's cheek and get stuck in their head.
- Accidental Murder: Played for laughs in Episode 8 when the aforementioned DVD ends up stuck in the skull of an unfortunate man in a pastis bottle costume who just happened to be standing next to Gilles when Karim tried to throw the DVD at him to prevent the Loony Mustached Operator from stealing it and missed (then again, if he hadn't missed, the DVD would presumably have killed Gilles instead). Unlike the ending of Episode 12 where Morvain kills Morvan, forcing the team to get rid of his body and disappear, this is merely a short gag which is irrelevant to the plot and never mentioned again.
- Acting for Two: Episode 11 shows that In-Universe, Morvain played 2 characters in the awful short he directed. Both are obviously him in bad wigs.
- Actionized Sequel:
- Episode 1 starts with a fight between the team and Professor Kung-Fu whereas Crossed never even featured fight scenes.
- Although the team rarely encounters the Pseudonyms directly, the former's season-long quest to foil the latter's Evil Plan provides some tension Crossed's Negative Continuity lacked.
- Agent Scully: Karim acknowledges that this trope can be used to help the audience accept the supernatural explanation by making the down to Earth explanation increasingly unlikely, but he criticizes its use in Signs (where the policewoman is just being a dick about it) and Paranormal Activity (where Micah does believe there is something supernatural going on, but doesn't trust demonologists and does his best to antagonize the demon).
- Alan Smithee: Invoked, Kamel explains this pseudonym's meaningnote in the third episode. He doesn't mention that this pseudonym is no longer used nowadays and instead implies that it's still the only pseudonym union American directors can use, but it's impossible to tell whether it's an error or subtle Foreshadowing that the episode isn't set in our universe.
- Alien Blood: People possessed by the Pseudonyms have yellow transparent blood (implied to be urine) instead of red blood.
- Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
- Invoked for Signs, where Karim and Kamel are identical in everything... except their opinion about the film. Karim thinks the film fails because he forcefully passes plot devices as "divine signals", which can fool the characters but not the viewers. Kamel points out that nothing in the film actually proves that the aliens are hostile, and that the characters who perceive divine signals might just as well be completely wrong; but the viewer is still led into adopting their point of view.
- Mocked in the review for Mac And Me. When Jeremy starts doing the same thing with the aliens from the movie, theorizing they were evil, Karim openly calls it bullshit and somewhat racist.
- Discussed in Episodes 9 and 10, in which Kamel explains why he believes Halloween and Gremlins are misinterpreted as perverted for the former and racist for the latter by some analyses.
- Alternate Universe: Different parallel universes (sometimes called "dimensions") are featured, and Karim and Kamel are alternate versions of each other. The differences between their respective universes are sometimes small (for instance, in Kamel's world, people count in Esperanto), sometimes important and relevant to the plot (the Pseudonyms are found in Karim's world but not in Kamel's).
- Aluminum Christmas Trees:
- In-universe, in Episode 3, Kamel criticizes Highlander 2 for going for the cliché "Corrupt Corporate Executive trying to monopolize a vital resource" plot and says it never happens in real life. Well this kind of people do exist, as the California electricity crisis
proves it, to Kamel's shock. - In Episode 12, Karim reacts with disbelief when Gilles and Kamel explain to him that the method featured in Carnosaur for recreating dinosaurs by genetically engineering chickens is actually being tried out by geneticists with some success
. Gilles even points out that the mocking nickname Chickenosaurus Karim used was the very name the researchers used.
- In-universe, in Episode 3, Kamel criticizes Highlander 2 for going for the cliché "Corrupt Corporate Executive trying to monopolize a vital resource" plot and says it never happens in real life. Well this kind of people do exist, as the California electricity crisis
- Arc Welding: Each episode not only focuses on a movie, but also presents an overarching plot in which the greatest movies ever made are disappearing from existence and similar movies of far worse quality have become notorious in their place.
- Arc Words: "Pseudonyms". Not just because it's the name of the antagonists, but also because the people involved in knock-offs of good movies often hide behind them.
- Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: As soon as he appears, Professor Kung-Fu announces that he's going to mop the floor with Karim and his friends. Unfortunately for him, he's no match for the three of them.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
- Karim points out that in Knock Off, Van Damme's character, a simple jeans salesman, is able to hold his own against the Russian mafia, the Hong Kong triad, the CIA and even fruit sellers.
- In the final episode, we can see that Jérémy Morvain is wanted for murder, extraction-injection of piss for blood in a body, and theft of a book in a library.
- Artistic License – Chemistry: Kamel incorrectly describes human blood as "H₂O" in Episode 9. H₂O is of course the chemical formula of water, but while the main component of blood is indeed water, blood itself is a mixture but not a compound and therefore lacks a chemical formula.
- Artistic License – Film Production:
- Played for laughs and Lampshaded in scenes where the team pretends to shoot the episodes, as everything is shown to be shot in a single take, Morvain is able to do a perfect job as the sound engineer even though the only qualification he has is a pet salesman license, and Gilles somehow manages to film the camera used to film with the camera used to film.
- Kamel correctly explains what Alan Smithee means in Episode 3, but claims it's the only possible pseudonym DGA members can use. This was only true before 2000, then the pseudonym was retired, DGA members are now allowed to use any pseudonym on a case-by-case basis.
- Artistic License – Linguistics: Some gags of Episode 3 rely on the resemblance between the name of planet Zeist and the real town of Zeist
, the problem is that while the names are identical in writing, they're pronounced differently, but Kamel wrongly pronounces the latter like the former and wrongly uses the phonetic transcription of the latter for the former. - Artistic Stimulation: Mocked in Episode 7, where Karim believes that whoever edited Vidocq was high on cocaine.
- As Lethal as It Needs to Be: Mocked in Episode 2, where Karim observes that when the Big Bad fires at The Hero with a shotgun, the shotgun is so weak that the hero deflects the shots with a bar stool, but conveniently becomes a lot stronger once the hero manages to snag it and use it against the villain's bodyguard, who gets Blown Across the Room with a single shot.
- Ascended Extra:
- Since the series has a plot, several comic relief characters from Crossed have expanded roles in Chroma, especially Kamel, who greatly helps Karim's team fight the Pseudonyms.
- Although Kamel often intervened during reviews in Crossed, Karim was always the main host. In Chroma, Kamel gets to be the main host of a few episodes too.
- Gilles and Jérémy mainly appeared in Cutaway Gags in Crossed and rarely interacted with Karim and Kamel directly. In Chroma, they frequently intervene during the reviews, which compensates for Kamel's absence in some episodes set in Karim's world and Karim's absence in some episodes set in Kamel's world.
- Bad Future: In Episode 7, a portrait of Orson Welles shows Karim a future where good movies have disappeared, resulting in everyone having bad taste, wearing ridiculous outfits or cracking bad jokes.
- Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: The Pseudonyms' influence gradually causes everyone from Karim's world to behave this way. It first affects the ones they directly possess, which is why Morvan is the only one to find the aliens of Mac and Me cute in Episode 6, then everyone else, which is why Karim hates Goodfellas but likes Uwe Boll's films in Episode 11.
- Badge Gag: The fake passport Morvain obtains in the last episode to flee the police is an obvious forgery, the picture is a photo of Danny Trejo.
- Bait-and-Switch: The seventh review starts with Orson Welles telling Karim in a dream to review a film that revolutionized cinematic techniques, where the titular character dies early on and where we learn what happened through flashbacks recounted by people who knew him. Karim proceeds to review Vidocq.
- Bait-and-Switch Comparison: Kamel explains in Episode 9 that he enjoys slasher films for reasons similar to why he enjoys Tom and Jerry, except it's a lot more violent... in Tom And Jerry.
- Belated Injury Realization: When the Cerberus shoots a bullet through Karim's hand, it takes him a couple seconds to process it and start screaming.
- Berserk Button:
- Many of Morvan's jokes have this effect on Karim and prompt a Big "SHUT UP!", he's so fed up with them he even headbutts him in the opening of Episode 1.
- Karim also loses it when Kamel says he wishes Vidocq never existed, even though they both just panned it, because he believes every movie has a reason to exist.
- Kamel does not tolerate parodies of Goodfellas and when Morvain shows him one he made, he kicks the screen.
- Beware the Silly Ones:
- Morvan is shown to be a surprisingly good kung-fu fighter in Episode 1, he even has the upper hand against Karim even though the latter is armed with a nunchaku.
- He and the Loony Mustached Operator are also scarily effective at deleting good movies from existence after being possessed by the Pseudonyms.
- Morvain shoots Morvan dead in Episode 12 as payback after the latter tried to possess him too in Episode 5.
- Big "SHUT UP!":
- Karim has this response to Jérémy's jokes several times.
- This is also his reaction when Kamel suggests that the multiple interpretations of Signs would also work with Transformers.
- Big "WHAT?!": Karim has this reaction after a Double Take when he learns that Jérémy of all people is a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
- Bilingual Bonus: Professor Kung-Fu actually speaks (pretty bad) Chinese in Episode 1, but his actual lines don't match the subtitles, he just says he's Professor Kung-Fu and likes movies too.
- Binocular Shot: Used in Episode 10 when Karim confronts the Cerberus alone and Kamel and Morvain watch from afar. Funnily enough, the team's binoculars seem to somehow magnify sound too, since after the Cerberus shoots Karim in the hand, we only hear Karim's screams and the in-universe soundtrack when the camera is looking at him through the binoculars.
- Bittersweet Ending: Good movies still exist, but so do the Pseudonyms, and the team has to run from the authorities after Morvain kills Morvan.
- Blatant Lies:
- In Episode 3, when Kamel points out that Arturo's speech about parallel universes is lifted from Sliders, Arturo claims that any resemblance is purely coincidental.
- In Episode 6, Karim mentions that the alien's name, Mac, is the acronym of "Mysterious Alien Creature", then explains that in French, "Mysterious Alien Creature" translates as "vomit".
- Karim points out that the contaminated eggs the Big Bad of Carnosaur secretly feeds to people to spread her virus look so revolting no one in their right mind would eat them, he rhetorically asks "who the fuck eats that?", Morvain answers "nobody"... but says it with a mouth covered in the same black slime as the one inside the eggs.
- Breaking Old Trends:
- The show breaks several times the tradition of only having Karim host episodes, as Episode 3 and 10 are hosted by Kamel alone in his world, Episode 4 by Karim together with Kamel, and Episode 9 and 11 by Kamel with Karim as the Audience Surrogate.
- The blink-and-you'll-miss-it messages, the segments about amusing coincidences, the funny spoiler alerts and the gags with Hugo Jouxtel and Professor Sédétruk from Crossed were abandoned.
- Subverted in the first 3 episodes, where the host's Doppelgänger is absent, as if the show had abandoned this tradition from Crossed. Episode 3 eventually reveals that Karim and Kamel live in different universes and Episode 4 shows their first meeting and reveals that Chroma is set before Crossed.
- Similarly subverted in the first 11 episodes, where no one ever mentions how long before or after Jurassic Park (1993) a film came out, as if this Running Gag had been abandoned. It turns out that the Pseudonyms made everyone in Karim's world forget Jurassic Park, and when this is undone in the finale, the characters do compare the filming and release dates of Carnosaur and Jurassic Park.
- Brick Joke: In the first episode, Morvan mentions the "Pseudonyms", undefined monsters that "drink your blood and replace it with pee". A few episodes later, the Pseudonym-possessed Loony Mustached Operator and Morvan are shown to bleed urine.note
- Broken Record: In the Dream Intro of Episode 7, Karim realizes something's wrong when his friends keep repeating the same things over and over, and when he tells them to stop, they just move syllables around and continue.Gilles: Awesome!Kamel: Splendid!Jérémy: Cool!Gilles: Awesome!Kamel: Splendid!Jérémy: Cool!Gilles: Awesome!Kamel: Splendid!Jérémy: Cool!Gilles: Awesome!Kamel: Splendid!Jérémy: Cool!Gilles: Awesome!Kamel: Splendid!Jérémy: Cool!Gilles: Awesool!Kamel: Splendome!Jérémy: Cid!Gilles: Awedid...
- Bullying a Dragon: Karim mocks the tendency of Micah in Paranormal Activity to deliberately antagonize the supernatural presence in his house in a sketch where Jérémy is playing a threatening demon who is being bullied by Gilles like he's a little kid.
- The Bus Came Back: Gilles Stello reappears in Episode 10 after he refused to go with the others to Karim's universe at the end of Episode 3. However, in-universe, his appearance in Episode 10 actually predates his appearance in Episode 3.
- By "No", I Mean "Yes": In Episode 8, Karim says that Jean-Claude Van Damme and Tsui Hark "almost" enjoyed working with each other. He then clarifies that by "almost", he means "not at all".
- Call-Back: In Episode 2, Karim promises Morvan a pin for his collection if he writes the opening, but denies him the pin when Morvan screws up. In Episode 12, when Morvan brings a message from the Pseudonyms to the team after the Great Substitution fails, a tipsy Karim refuses to listen, claims that what matters is Morvan's happiness and finally gives him the pin seconds before Morvain shoots him dead.
- Call-Forward:
- The stoic cop saying "papers, please" was already a recurring character in Crossed, although whether the one from Crossed and the one from Chroma are the same person is unclear, they might be from different universes.
- In episode 5, Morvain mentions that he has a "commerce qualification, option small pets", also a joke from Crossed, where Morvan claimed to have the same qualification when asked what his job even is. This gag undergoes a Cerebus Retcon in the final episode, where Morvain kills Morvan: since Chroma is set before Crossed, this means Morvain impersonated Morvan after killing him and is actually the one who answers the question in Crossed.
- Like in Crossed, Karim loves (badly) drawing sphinxes for no reason and Gilles loves giving Word Salad Titles to his creations.
- Charles from Crossed also reappears and serves once again as a living censor bar in Episode 6.
- Calling Shotgun: Kamel immediately does it when Arturo offers him to travel to the other universes in Episode 3.
- The Cameo:
- Several of Karim's friends appear in episode 6, notably the Joueur du Grenier, whose own episodes Karim was co-writing at the time.
- Episode 3 features a vocal one from famous French voice actor Daniel Beretta (better known as the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger).
- Captain Obvious: When Karim notices some botched editing in Rollerball, he dramatically realizes he's watching a fictional moment and exclaims "oh my God, we're in a film!". Then again, he then makes the good point that something's definitely wrong with the film if viewers ever end up thinking this.
- Cat Scare: Played for laughs in Episode 5. During one of the Found Footage parts, Morvain is terrified by a strange noise... then realizes he just walked on some bubble wrap.
- Censored for Comedy: The film's countless Product Placements and Karim's Precision F Strikes are censored by a melodica note and a blurring machine in the Mac And Me review. Of course, by the end the blurring machine breaks and Karim asks the melodica man to stop it already, as the point he wants to make is that neither censorship nor forced product placement should prevent artists from expressing themselves.
- Cerebus Syndrome: Downplayed as comedy remains prominent, but after Episode 3 the plot thickens from pure gags to an overarching story which influences the video themselves.
- Chairman of the Brawl: Gilles uses a chair as a weapon to fight Professor Kung-Fu in episode 1.
- Character Development: It's subtle, but while Kamel is usually positioned as having the correct position on cinema, as seen more prominently in episodes 4 and 11, he does need to learn a lesson about valuing cinema appropriately, in the form of appreciating the value of bad films, as seen by his initial reaction to Vidocq being "I wish this movie had never existed", an assertion that earns him a Big "SHUT UP!" from Karim, and by his dismissive treatment of Troll 2 in the flashback in Episode 10. After Karim explains to him that Vidocq's existence is necessary, Kamel admits he's right, and in the last 2 episodes, his theses ("films can only have meaning in relation to other films" and "cinema as an art form must be taken as a whole") do regard bad films as necessary for the existence of cinema.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- A literal example, Morvain is shown to own a gun in Episode 8, then shoots Morvan dead with it in Episode 12.
- Discussed and defined in Episode 4, in which Karim regards the instances of this trope in Signs as lazy writing, while Kamel points out that they may instead be interpreted as coincidences misconstrued by the main characters as divine signs.
- Christmas Episode:
- Episode 9 itself isn't exactly Christmas-themed, but Silent Night, Deadly Night is, the episode came out in December and begins with a message wishing the audience a merry Christmas.
- The review of Gremlins was one in-universe complete with a Christmas Song sung by Gilles, but not in reality since Episode 10 came out in February and the review is a Whole Episode Flashback.
- Chromosome Casting: Apart from a few short gags, there are no female characters in the show.
- Clone Degeneration: In Episode 9, Kamel compares the Slasher Movie subgenre's overreliance on copying earlier films while distorting their tropes into a reactionary message to this trope by showing a blue picture then a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of it, which degenerated so much it turned red.
- Closest Thing We Got: After Morvan is thrown out for his fart joke in Episode 5, Karim asks Morvain whether he can replace him as the sound engineer. Morvain only answers that he has a license in pet selling, but Karim finds this satisfactory.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Jérémy Morvan. In Episode 5, he shows glimpses of his appartment and day to day life, with emphasis on his hippopotamus and tiger slippers. His Alternate Self Jérémy Morvain shares this trait, for instance in Episode 12, we see him sleep and eat simultaneously.
- Cluster F-Bomb:
- Kamel does one in Episode 5 when he realizes that Karim doesn't know who Steven Spielberg is and regards E.T. as a terrible film he's going to review next. It turns out that Karim did know Spielberg but had forgotten him because of the Pseudonyms, and that Kamel mistook for E.T. the film Karim was talking about, he actually meant Mac and Me.
- Karim does an even longer one at the end of his scathing review of Mac and Me... but everything is Censored for Comedy with melodica notes.
- Kamel does another, subtler one in the review of Goodfellas when he mentions how many instances of the f-word the film contains:
"When it came out, it was the film with the most "fuck"s in it: 321 "fuck"s, that's a lot of "fuck"s, more than 2 "fuck"s per minute, but that's still much fewer "fuck"s than Fuck, a documentary film about the word "fuck", which totals 857 "fuck"s in 93 minutes, or 9.21 "fuck"s per minute. F... fantastic." - Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The show uses blue lighting in Karim's universe and red lighting in Kamel's. The title sequence is also colored differently depending on who reviews the movie. This system is a subtle allusion to the sky in Highlander 2, whose color varies depending on the cut.
- Color Motif: In addition to Karim's aforementioned association with blue and Kamel's with red, the red-blue contrast is used in various places throughout the show, for instance in Episode 9, Kamel illustrates the problem of imitation leading to a genre's degeneration by photocopying a blue picture so many times it turns red.
- The Comics Code: Karim tells the story of the CCA in Episode 12 in order to find elements to solve the mystery of the final shot of Carnosaur, which focuses on a burning picture of Alfred E. Neuman, of all things.
- Conflict Ball: Everyone in the crew picks it in the first episode where Karim headbutting Morvan out of frustration at his lack of seriousness leads to a lengthy gratuitous fight among the crew plus, unexplainably, Professor Kung-Fu. This is contrasted in Episode 10, which is Episode 1 as it happened in Kamel's universe: released on schedule with everyone getting along.
- Content Warnings: Played for laughs in Episode 9, which advises viewers to lock their children up before watching the episode due to its violent content.
- Cosmic Entity: The incarnation of spacetime itself as a humanoid with a Celestial Body appears on the show's set for a short gag in Episode 6. Karim isn't surprised to see it and calls it "our old friend".
- Credits Gag: In Episode 3's credits, the usual names are replaced with their alternate selves', revealing that the episode is set in a different universe. The only exception is Charles A. Blengino's, because Arturo is the only character in the episode who comes from Karim's universe.
- Critic Breakdown: Karim is so infuriated by Mac and Me that right before he concludes the review, he yells at its constant Enforced Plugs to fuck off.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: In Episode 1, Jérémy is the only one who is scared when he hears Karim say "pseudonym", and when he mentions Pseudonyms are blood-sucking monsters, Karim and Gilles assume it's one of his silly jokes and completely ignore him. At the end of the episode, it turns out the Pseudonyms are Real After All when they attack Jérémy.
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: When Karim is about to make an overused reference to La Haine, Kamel threatens to slit his throat with a piece of a rusty can crudely attached to a dirty toothbrush... and have a witch, a marabout, a druid and a voodoo priest curse him for 3 generations.
- Damned by Faint Praise:
- Karim just says Paranormal Activity was "interesting". When Kamel asks him whether he means "good", Karim replies "interesting" again.
- The least insulting word Karim comes up with to describe Rob Schneider's filmography is "existent".
- Dark Reprise: In the 8th episode's opening, a slowed-down, disturbingly ominous version of Allô, allô, monsieur l'ordinateur
plays. - Dark and Troubled Past: Played for laughs in Episode 8, where Morvain tells a ridiculously long story to explain why he owns a gun, which involved his mother selling crack. We don't hear all of it, as it's implied to be hours long, and he concludes it by saying "why do I have a Beretta? Because the world".
- Decoy Protagonist: While Karim is the show's host most of the time and is the one to do most of the reviews, he turns out to be rather unhelpful when it comes to thwarting the Pseudonyms' plan, Kamel ends up being the show's true protagonist since he's the one to be sent by Arturo to Karim's world to help, to solve Archimed Kebab's riddles, to figure the Pseudonyms' plan out and to understand how to defeat them.
- Department of Redundancy Department:
- Karim always refers to the demon in the Paranormal Activity review as some variant of "the devilish demon from infernal hell".
- In Episode 12, Karim states that films are made by people who make films, prompting Kamel to answer with "wow". Karim then clarifies that what he meant by that is that he believes any film can be better analyzed by looking at the state of the movie industry when it was made, since the choices filmmakers make when they make films depend on what they were going through, and movies are obviously a big part of their life.
- Despair Speech: Played for laughs in Episode 3, where Kamel makes one about the world being doomed when he learns about Enron.
- Didn't We Use This Joke Already?: Episode 3 contains an instance of an untranslatable pun, Stello is later about to prompt Kamel to make it again but Kamel stops him because they already did it.
- Disposing of a Body: In the last episode, the corrupted Morvan is shot in the head by Morvain, leading to an epilogue where the crew goes to a farm to cut up the body and throw the pieces in a river.
- Distracted by My Own Sexy: Karim finds his identical alternate self Kamel very attractive and calls him a "sublime ephebe with a perfect skin" within seconds of meeting him.
- The Ditz: Jérémy Morvan and Jérémy Morvain, the microphone holders of Karim and Kamel respectively and the self-proclaimed "joke guys" of their respective shows, are often funny not because of their jokes but because of the silly things they say and the points they miss. For instance, in Episode 4, it takes Morvan nearly the entire review to realize the identical Karim and Kamel look similar, and in Episode 9, when Kamel plays Gene Siskel's review of Silent Night, Deadly Night in which he calls the film contemptible, Morvain is confused and asks whether he liked it.
- Do Not Do This Cool Thing : Discussed. François Truffaut's famous quote about how anti-war movies all end up being pro-war is mentionned in the GoodFellas review to point out that the film is very fast paced and yet, contrary to Scarface (1983), does not end with an epic battle and an iconic death, but with the protagonist leading the kind of mundane and boring life he didn't want, thus avoiding that pitfall to an extent.
- Double-Meaning Title: Officially, the show's title is a blend of chronique (feature) and cinéma (cinema), but it also refers to the parallel universes, whose most blatant difference is the color of the set's lighting.
- Double Take:
- In Episode 7, when Jérémy mentions he reads Jean-Paul Sartre, it takes Karim a few seconds to process it and react with a Big "WHAT?!".
- In Episode 10, when Gilles mentions Gremlins is his favorite racist movie, Kamel doesn't notice it at first and pretends to end the episode... then after a few seconds of fake credits, we go back to the episode with Kamel answering "wait, what?".
- Dream Intro: Episode 7 begins with Karim dreaming of a portrait of Orson Welles goading him into talking about a good movie for change. Karim proceeds to talk about Vidocq while we were led into thinking he'd talk about Citizen Kane.
- Dude, Not Funny!:
- Morvan keeps acting like a clown on the inaugural episode of Chroma, and Karim berates him for that, eventually headbutting him.
- Morvan farting onscreen in Episode 5 shocks and offends everyone so much they receive a letter from the government asking to censor it.
- Dull Surprise: Discussed in the Signs review, which seems to be a contest of who can act the least. Not the worst, just... the least.Karim: "...Yes? Ah, sorry, it seems Mel Gibson has crashed. Can someone reboot him? Quick, he's starting to have flashbacks!"
- Eldritch Abomination: The Pseudonyms are tentacled monsters that can possess people by drinking their blood and replacing it with urine, and erase good movies from existence, we have no idea where they come from or even why they even do any of these things.
- The Ending Changes Everything: A lot of twists happens near the end of each episode, changing the perspective of what's been happening during it. The most notable is at the end of Episode 3, where it's revealed that the episode was hosted by Kamel all along and is actually set in his universe rather than Karim's.
- Evil Plan: The Pseudonyms want to replace good movies with bad ones until every good movie is gone from existence, the team calls this plan the Great Substitution. In Episode 12, it turns out that this plan is doomed to fail because bad movies can't exist without good ones and conversely.
- Executive Meddling: Discussed by Karim in Episode 2, 6 and 8 and by Kamel in Episode 3. It has a tendency to ruin the movies of competent film directors, ruining the original intention and alienating said directors from the producer in the first place. Karim theorizes that Knock Off is a mockery of Hollywood.
- Extreme Omnivore: Morvain is the only person who dares eat the disgusting contaminated eggs from Carnosaur.
- Eye Scream: The special effects of Mac and Me are so hideous, Karim asks a dentist to make him blind, the dentist agrees and starts his drill. This is just a throwaway gag, however, and Karim can still see afterwards.
- Failed Attempt at Scaring: Karim is very bored by Paranormal Activity, to the point that he falls asleep during it. When a door unexplainably moves, he's actually excited that something happens, then points out that excitement is not what he's supposed to be feeling.
- Fake-Out Fade-Out:
- In Episode 2, the credits start rolling as soon as Karim states that John McTiernan's Rollerball doesn't exist. He has to angrily tell his team to stop the credits so that he can finish explaining what he meant by that: the film he just reviewed obviously does exist but the Rollerball McTiernan wanted to make was ruined by his producers and is effectively no longer his film.
- In Episode 10, the credits start rolling after the team agrees that Gremlins is great and Gilles mentions it's his favorite racist film... until Kamel realizes Gilles just said "racist" and goes on to argue why he believes this theory is wrong.
- In Episode 11, Kamel concludes the review by telling Karim that Quentin Tarantino once said that you can either like movies or like movies you like, and that he has to choose. Karim answers "I've chosen", the credits start rolling... then Karim angrily stops them because he hasn't finished answering.
- Fanboy:
- Karim doesn't even try to hide he's a huge one for Jean-Claude Van Damme, and spends a long sequence gushing about his badassery in Knock Off.
- He's also apparently a fan of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, but he denies it very unconvincingly.
- Fauxlosophic Narration: Karim is so bored by Paranormal Activity that he starts rambling on how much life had to evolve from basic particles to allow us to watch a couple sleep.
- Fictional Document: In Episode 3, Kamel introduces his audience to the book The Shitty Writer's 2 and a Half Tricks: the first is to use telepathy as an excuse to film scenes without a script like in Highlander 2, the second is to redub scenes to avoid filming them again after rewrites no matter how bad the synchronization is. We never learn what the "half" is.
- Finishing Each Other's Sentences: When Gilles and Karim overcome the Pseudonyms' brain-washing and finally remember Jurassic Park in Episode 12, they keep finishing Kamel's sentences about it, to his annoyance.
- Fluffy the Terrible: Horrible monsters able to replace someone' blood with piss and delete good movies from the universe are lurking around. Their names? Pseudonyms. Downplayed as he word isn't cute sounding but doesn't sound threatening either. It actually refers to the pseudonyms makers of worthless rip-offs of good films hide behind.
- Foreshadowing:
- A very subtle (and possibly accidental) instance occurs in Episode 2, where we briefly see Steven Spielberg's face in some news footage shown while Karim recaps the Pellicano affair even though Episodes 4, 5 and 6 imply that Spielberg never existed in Karim's universe. This foreshadows the reveal that he did exist in Karim's universe, but the Pseudonyms made everyone in Karim's universe forget him.
- Episode 3, which places an emphasis on canon, contradicts the previous 2 episodes by featuring a new set treated as unchanged in-universe and features Jérémy acting out of character when he doesn't react to hearing the word "pseudonym". It foreshadows the fact that the whole episode is set in a parallel universe.
- Found Footage: Part of Episode 5 is narrated that way, fitting the review's theme.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Not the same extent as Crossed, but some episodes have funny details that only appear for a split second, such as the letter the government writes to the team in Episode 6, which contains a barely legible sentence pointing out that you can only read it by pausing at the right time.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Karim finds Morvan annoying and often yells at him to shut up."Why do I talk to you!?"
- Genius Ditz: Morvan and Morvain both show shades of this trope several times, for instance Morvain manages to perfectly remember and narrate the entire review of Gremlins in Episode 10, and Morvan can instantly make sense of the incomprehensible continuity of the pseudo-sequels to House (1986) in Episode 1 whereas Gilles fails completely.
- Get Out!:
- When he sees a Visual Pun depicting Hollywood's upper crust as a literal upper crust in Episode 2, Karim orders whoever made it fired... then adds "after the lunch break".
- When Jérémy does a fart joke in Episode 5, Karim orders him to leave the set. In Episode 6, Jérémy has to swear he won't do it again before being allowed to return.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Humans possessed by Pseudonyms sport these when they use their power to replace good movies with bad ones. This is how Morvain realizes Morvan is one.
- Grammar Nazi:
- Gilles sometimes does this to Karim's annoyance, and isn't always correct, as he apparently believed "iceberg" is spelt "iceburg".
- During the review of Vidocq, Karim makes up the verbs traquenardiser ("pitfallize") and guet-apenter ("ambushate") but has to settle for "trap" when Kamel points out they don't exist.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Whenever Kamel counts (and only when he counts, not when he uses a number in a sentence), he uses Esperanto numbers (although with an erroneous Frenchified pronunciation), because for some reason, this is how numbers work in his world.
- Greater-Scope Paragon:
- While he only briefly appears, Arturo is implied to be one, as he appears to know more about parallel universes than any other character and sends Kamel's team to Karim's world to help defeat the Pseudonyms without fighting the latter directly.
- Archimed Kebab also qualifies, as he doesn't fight the Pseudonyms directly either but leaves riddles to help find the key to defeating them.
- Hidden Depths:
- Karim shows in Episode 1 that he knows how to wield a nunchaku, and in Episode 4 that he can perform card tricks. He also mentions in Episode 2 that he's a competitive bobsledder, of all things.
- Morvan might be portrayed as The Ditz most of the time, but he shows in Episode 1 that he's a surprisingly powerful kung-fu fighter and in Episode 5 that he can play the piano.
- Homemade Sweater from Hell: Karim and Kamel both like wearing them.
- Horrible Hollywood: In Episode 5, Karim asks his friends which words they think of when they hear "cinema", and they promptly answer stuff like "money", "cocaine" and "prostitutes".
- Hypocritical Humor:
- Subverted in Episode 3, where Kamel explains that the color of the sky in Highlander 2 was arbitrarily changed from blue to red during the film's production, then points out that his team would never change the color of the show's set for no reason... except the set is red in this episode even though it was blue in the first 2. It's eventually revealed that Kamel was sincere and the color stayed the same, the universe is different.
- A very subtle example occurs at the end of the same episode. Earlier in the review, Kamel points out that the telepathy in Highlander 2 was a blatant excuse to film scenes even though their script wasn't written yet, and mentions this trick is part of the Fictional Document The Shitty Writer's 2 and a Half Tricks. The very same book can very briefly be seen at the end right next to Arturo when he contacts the team... telepathically.
- In Episode 5, Karim criticizes Paranormal Activity 3 (which is set in the 1980s) for being filmed with blatantly anachronistic cameras and unconvincingly pretending to be filmed with period-accurate cameras nevertheless by showing the characters using them. Gilles confirms that it's ridiculous to pretend to film with the wrong camera... while pretending to film Karim with a camera which is obviously not the one used to film since it's a reverse shot.
- In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, you can see that the letter the government sends to the team in Episode 6 to complain about the show's vulgarity is itself full of profanity.
- Identical Twin Mistake:
- Not exactly an example involving twins, but in Episode 9, Jérémy mistakes Karim for Kamel before they point out to him (and the audience) that you can tell them apart from their outfits.
- Another example involving a resemblance rather than a twin is found in Episode 3 and played for laughs, several gags involve the team mixing up Michael Ironside and the French actor Jean-Pierre Bacri, who was indeed a dead ringer for him.
- I'm Not Doing That Again:
- In the Troll 2 review, he notes that the only way to be scared by the film would be "to watch it on a smartphone, chased by twenty hungry wolves". Before adding "And that's something I'll never do again".
- Karim mentions in Episode 7 that he and his team had the bad idea of watching a 3D version of the already borderline-unwatchable Vidocq. The experience was so painful that he says they'll never try this again.
- Impaled Palm: In Episode 10, the Cerberus shoots a bullet through Karim's hand the second he misunderstands his riddle and shows his ID.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Kamel mocks General Katana's hitmen in Highlander 2 for failing to land a single hit on the now-old Connor, who can barely even run at his age.
- Improved by the Re-Cut:
- Kamel finds the Revised Ending (nicknamed the "Fairytale Ending") of Highlander 2 So Bad, It's Good and believes it makes watching the film worthwhile.
- On the other hand, he regards the Renegade Cut as inferior to even the infamous theatrical cut because it fails to improve the plot's coherence but removes the most nonsensical part, Zeist, even though it was arguably the most entertainingly bad part of the film.
- Inconsistent Coloring:
- The color of the Operator's mustache changes between episodes because the crew kept losing and replacing it.
- Subverted in Episode 3, where the colors of the show's set are different from no apparent reason with none of the characters acknowledging the change and Kamel even denying there was one. It turns out that the colors didn't change, the video is actually an episode of the show's counterpart in Kamel's world.
- Inexplicably Awesome: Karim points out that Jean-Claude Van Damme's character in Knock Off is the only character in the film who is neither a gangster nor a secret agent, and therefore the only one who never received any special training... and yet, he consistently single-handedly defeats gangsters and rogue agents throughout the film.
- Innocuously Important Episode: The Pseudonyms and the parallel universes are introduced in Episode 1, but since Episode 2 is a Standalone Episode involving neither, it's easy to assume they were just throwaway gags, especially considering that Crossed had a Negative Continuity. The episode becomes much more important in hindsight when the parallel universes start becoming relevant to the plot in Episode 3 and the Pseudonyms in Episode 5.
- Instantly Proven Wrong:
- When Kamel calls the Shield Corporation in Highlander 2 unrealistic, Gilles and Jérémy show him news footage about the artificial power shortages Enron
caused in real life to drive up the price of electricity. He admits there are immoral corporations in real life but claims that the film exaggerates in that it shows executives mocking the people they deprive of resources... only for Gilles and Jérémy to prove him wrong again by playing taped phone calls proving Enron's executives actually did the exact same thing. - In Episode 9, when a man in a Santa suit is gunned down by a police officer who mistook him for the film's killer, Kamel claims it was the man's fault, since he refused to freeze when the officer ordered him to... but the film then clarifies that the man was deaf and didn't hear the officer, prompting Kamel to take his last sentence back.
- When Kamel mentions that The Sopranos was such an affectionate homage to Goodfellas that it featured actors from it, Karim replies that it might just be a coincidence... Kamel immediately points out that the show featured 27 actors from Goodfellas.
- In Episode 12, Karim and Morvain find the film's Big Bad's idea of recreating dinosaurs by mutating chickens ridiculous, but Kamel and Gilles promptly retort that this method has actually been attempted by geneticists and that they successfully caused chicken embryos to de-evolve.
- When Doc, the protagonist of Carnosaur, is gunned down at the end of the film, Karim theorizes that he isn't actually dead... but before he can finish his sentence, the film definitely proves him wrong when Doc's body is shown to be burned with a flamethrower immediately afterwards.
- When Kamel calls the Shield Corporation in Highlander 2 unrealistic, Gilles and Jérémy show him news footage about the artificial power shortages Enron
- Intentional Engrish for Funny: The video Jérémy directs in Episode 11 has ridiculously bad English subtitles, most notably when he says "Hasta la vista... baby", which is subtitled "Until the view... little children".
- It Makes Sense in Context: After the end of the review part of Episode 12, a tipsy Karim alludes to earlier gags of the review when he tells Morvan "today I understood things about bloody belches and Élie Kakou", but Morvan, who wasn't here when the review was filmed, is just confused.
- It's a Long Story:
- When Karim first meets Kamel in Episode 4 and asks him where he came from, Kamel says this verbatim. When Karim insists, Kamel convinces him to keep the explanations for later by arguing that his story could be told as a Spin-Off someday.
- At the end of Episode 8, when the team discovers the Loony Mustached Operator is controlled by the Pseudonyms, Jérémy surprises everyone by whipping out a Beretta and holding the Operator at gunpoint. When Karim asks why Jérémy has a Beretta, Jérémy says the stock phrase, and when Karim just tells him to continue, Jérémy proceeds to recite his whole colorful life, getting sidetracked for so long the Operator escapes while everyone is distracted.
- Jerkass to One: While Karim and Kamel aren't exactly nice in the comedy moments, what with being prolific Deadpan Snarkers, the serious parts of their analysis have them somewhat respectful of the movies they review, even those they found bad. The two exceptions, one for each, are Mac and Me, with Karim delivering the usual end-of-episode cinematographic aesop with genuine anger, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, which Kamel explicitly paints as an example of the worst fate cinema could suffer.
- Jinx Game: Morvan loses one against Stella in Episode 4 and is forbidden from speaking until someone says his name, Karim later tricks him into speaking by calling him Jean-Rémy, prompting Gilles to hit him with a slipper. Even though this game is usually called "chips" in French, they call it "Pepsi" here, it's impossible to tell whether it was a mistake, as the residents of Kamel's world are shown to use slightly different words, but Morvan and Stella are from Karim's, or an implication that Karim's team isn't originally from our universe either and also uses slightly different words.
- Jump Cut: Karim notices that Rollerball is very poorly edited and frequently "stutters". He re-edits a scene himself to show these abnormalities are often quite easy to fix, then explains that their main cause was the film's hasty retooling during its production due to Executive Meddling.
- Jump Scare: Played for laughs in the Paranormal Activity review, where Karim is so bored by the film he tries to add his own scare by suddenly appearing in a bad Halloween mask and yelling "nyeh!". Kamel finds it pathetic.
- Just Eat Gilligan:
- The reviews of Troll 2 and Highlander 2 both have a skit made with puppets showing how the respective films would instantly end if their characters weren't stupid and just made one sensible decision.
- Karim points out that the Alchemist's plan in Vidocq is both needlessly complicated, since the Alchemist has actual superpowers he could just use to easily assassinate his targets, and the only reason why Vidocq was able to track him down, since it resulted in countless clues and witnesses. Worse, this means that the Alchemist then has to come up with a second convoluted plan just to get rid of the evidence and it also backfires.
- Kill and Replace: Heavily implied in the last episode since Jérémy Morvain kills Jérémy Morvan even though Chroma is set before Crossed, in which a man calling himself Jérémy Morvan who looks exactly like Chroma's Morvan and Morvain does appear.
- Kill Tally: Kamel counts every kill in Silent Night, Deadly Night and observes that 12 people die in it, an average number for a Slasher Movie at the time.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Episode 12, when Morvain asks how long it took him to find the reel projector (needed to watch the reel they found in episode 10), Karim answers "four months". Four months is the actual time it took for the episode to come out due to technical issues.
- Like Reality, Unless Noted: While it's generally assumed that Karim's universe is ours (aside from the Pseudonyms), as the films in it are the same as in reality (whereas in Kamel's universe, at least one real movie, Highlander 2, doesn't exist until Arturo sends it to the team), it's somewhat implied that it might actually be a slightly different parallel universe since according to Episode 1, Gilles is the one who created You Can Leave Your Hat On in this universe rather than Randy Newman. However, according to the same episode, Karim's team has traveled to another universe at least once before the show started, so another possibility is that Karim's team was originally from another universe and ended up living in ours.
- Limited Wardrobe: Karim and Kamel wear their sweatshirts in every single episode, unlike in Crossed, where they sometimes wore sleeveless shirts instead.
- Living Photo: Episode 7 starts with Karim dreaming about a talking portrait of Orson Welles who shows him what the world will become if the Pseudonyms win.
- Logic Bomb: In Episode 2, when Karim explains that in the film's final rollerball game, the one rule is that there are no rules anymore, Jérémy points out the paradox in this sentence and gets stuck on a loop: if there are no rules, there's no one rule, but then there are rules, so there's a one rule, but it says there are no rules, so there's no one rule, but then...
- Long List:
- In Episode 12, Karim mentions that Peter Jackson’s BrainDead was renamed Dead Alive in some countries to avoid confusion with another film titled Brain Dead... then points out that Dead Alive is actually more confusing by listing many works with similar titles.
- In the same episode, he lists many improbable things Snoop Dogg did, but after a while, he has no idea what the hell he's looking at anymore and just starts questioning what's going on.
- Look Behind You: The Loony Mustached Operator shouts "watch out, a pastis man!" to distract Karim and try to steal the DVD of Knock Off in Episode 8. As it turns out, there's actually a man in a pastis bottle costume in the room for no reason at all.
- Lost in Translation: Episode 10 is the only one to have English subtitles, which were made so that Joe Dante could watch it at a screening where he was invited. Unfortunately, the show's humor heavily relies on untranslatable puns, so most of the jokes are ruined in the subtitles.
- "Magic A" Is "Magic A": In Episode 3, Kamel criticizes Highlander 2 for not obeying the clear established rules of the previous movie, saying that it takes the spectator away from the movie, and is a sign of disrespect.
- Malicious Misnaming:
- Karim nicknames the protagonist of Rollerball "Bob the Dumbass" because of his stupid choice to trust the Obviously Evil Petrovich.
- He also keeps deliberately getting Dr Tiptree's name wrong in Episode 12.
- Me's a Crowd: Both Gilleses like to duplicate themselves when they sing, for some reason. In Episode 10, Stello does this enough times to cover the screen with hundreds of clones singing simultaneously in formations shaped like falling snowflakes.
- Meaningful Name: Professor Kung-Fu is conveniently a kung-fu fighter. Which is the only thing we know about him.
- Mistaken for Racist:
- In episode 10, Karim faces the Cerberus, who’s dressed as a policeman, only for the latter to ask "papers, please". Karim is pissed, apparently thinking the policeman is asking him that because he looks Arabicnote , while it was actually a riddle. As Kamel figures out, the policeman was asking to see not his "papiers" (papers) but his "pas-pieds" (not-feet), meaning his hands.
- In the same episode, Kamel explains why he believes critics who call Gremlins a racist film are wrong.
- The Mockbuster:
- Troll 2, Mac and Me and Carnosaur all qualify, and the Pseudonyms' power is shown to create more and delete what they ripped off in the first place from Karim's universe.
- In Episode 1, the parallel universes are introduced when Karim reads that Bruno Mattei directed Terminator 2: the team starts panicking because the only possible explanation would be that they ended up in the wrong universe, they prepare to leave through a portal, but Karim then realizes that what Mattei directed was actually the totally unrelated Shocking Dark, which was also distributed under the title Terminator 2 to scam people into buying it, and points out that Shocking Dark is itself a mockbuster of Aliens.
- Monster Delay:
- Karim points out in Episode 1 that this trope is surprisingly averted in Troll 2 despite its cheesy goblin costumes. Conversely, immediately after Karim's remark, the episode itself plays the trope straight by not showing the Pseudonyms until its very last shot.
- Similarly, Episode 5 doesn't show the Pseudonyms until the last few Found Footage segments, whereas the previous ones focus on the possessed Morvan.
- Moral Guardians:
- The opening of Episode 6 features an in-universe exaggerated example: the public condemns Morvan's fart joke so harshly that the government orders the show censored.
- Episode 9 tells the story of the controversy Silent Night, Deadly Night caused. However, Kamel then points out that the film itself isn't that shocking and wasn't even the first Slasher Movie with a killer dressed like Santa Claus in it: the parents who protested against it had never actually watched it, they were angry because ads for it were broadcast during family-friendly timeslots. He also mentions that many slasher films are paradoxical in that they tend to have reactionary undertones that should please conservatives but also contain sex and violence, precisely what conservative moviegoers don't want to see. His theory to explain this paradox is that it was caused by imitators of Halloween who just copied the film's general structure but ignored or misinterpreted John Carpenter's points.
- Motor Mouth: As a successor of Crossed, Karim Debbache's fast elocution is par for the course.
- Mouth of Sauron: In Episode 12, the Pseudonyms try to communicate with the team through Morvan, but before he can convey their message, Morvan shoots him dead.
- The Movie Buff: Karim and Kamel, obviously.
- Multiple Endings: Discussed, Highlander 2 has two endings, making Kamel realize that the movie had a chaotic production, lifting some of the blame he's had for it.
- Mundane Made Awesome: In Episode 3, to explain how the setting of a film is merely what is shown in it rather the whole world it's set in, Kamel shows a short film titled Star Wars: Episode XIX – The Chill Menace... which actually consists of a few seconds of Jérémy playing cards.
- Named After Somebody Famous: The secretary who types the letter to the team in Episode 6 is named Stephen J. Cannell.
- Namesake Gag: Archimed Kebab, the host of Chromatographe, invented kebabs and named them after himself.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: Karim criticizes Troll 2 for conveniently giving Joshua's grandfather new powers whenever he needs them, and mocks this by showing Luke Skywalker instantly defeat Darth Vader with his "villain-exploding magical power".
- Night-Vision Goggles: During the review of Rollerball, the camera briefly switches to night vision mode so that Karim can explain why shooting a scene this way makes sense in his show, since it has an In-Universe Camera, but not in the infamous night vision scene in Rollerball, since it doesn't have one.
- No Fourth Wall: In Episode 6, right after Karim and Kamel realize that something's wrong with Morvan because he knows about E.T. even though it's supposed to be unknown in Karim's universe, Morvain barges into the set to literally warn the team that this moment is The Reveal. Since this scene isn't supposed to be part of the review's in-universe script, it means that the characters have Medium Awareness to an extent.
- Noodle Incident:
- The existence of parallel universes is revealed in Episode 1, according to which the team has been to another universe before, we never find out what happened exactly.
- Unlike Karim and Gilles, Jérémy already knows about the Pseudonyms before they possess him, we never find out how he learned about them.
- A gag in the Mac and Me review reveals that Gilles is somehow acquainted with Barack Obama. Later, in the same episode, another gag reveals that Karim and his friends are also acquainted with spacetime itself.
- Anything involving Professor Kung-Fu.
- The Noseless: Morvan makes his nose disappear during a short gag in Episode 5 just to make an untranslatable pun. Karim is unimpressed and tells him that making his jokes elaborate doesn't make them funny.
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Kamel has to insist that the title of the French film Mais qu'est-ce que j'ai fait au bon Dieu pour avoir une femme qui boit dans les cafés avec les hommes ?note is real.
- Not That Kind of Doctor: Mac and Me's special effects are so horrible they damage Karim's eyesight, so he consults a doctor... who points out there's not much he can help with because he's a dentist.
- Off-the-Shelf FX:
- The team's blurring machine is a fog machine with a plastic Gaul helmet glued on it.
- The equipment the team uses to analyze Pseudonym-infected blood is a children's chemistry set.
- In some shots of Episode 5, the Pseudonyms' tentacles are actually pool hoses.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Morvain implies that Karim's world is the 347th he visited with Kamel and the Operator.
- Oh, Crap!:
- The whole team panics in Episode 1 when Karim realizes that since Bruno Mattei directed Terminator 2, they must be in the wrong universe. It then turns out it's a false alarm and just a case of Very False Advertising.
- Karim and Kamel both have this reaction when they realize at the same time that Morvan is under the Pseudonyms' control in Episode 6.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Happens whenever a good film is turned into a bad one by the Pseudonyms.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: The classic "however, you buttfuck a goat once..." joke is told at the end of Episode 2, and Karim suggests the audience watch John McTiernan's films apart from Rollerball lest McTiernan too be a victim of this trope.
- One of Us: Kamel mentions by name the trope Agent Scully in Episode 4 and uses the term Trope Codifier in Episode 9, he's therefore familiar with This Very Wiki in-universe and so are the show's writers in real life.
- Other Me Annoys Me:
- Both Jérémies panic when they first see each other in Episode 4, this doesn't last and they seem to get along in Episode 5, but Morvan eventually finds Morvain annoying because he keeps filming everything he sees.
- Zig-Zagged with Karim and Kamel, they like each other right away and are often Thinking the Same Thought, but when they aren't, they easily argue about minor details.
- Out-of-Holiday Episode:
- In Episode 10, Kamel points out that even though Gremlins is set during Christmas, it actually came out in June.
- Episode 10 itself is an example since the review is set during Christmas but the episode came out in February. This is justified by the review being a flashback.
- Episode 1 is an in-universe accidental example: Morvan greets the audience in a Santa suit, only for Karim to tell him that the episode came out later than he hoped for and missed Christmas.
- Overshadowed by Controversy: Kamel observes that despite Silent Night, Deadly Night's reputation, it's not unusually violent or lewd for a slasher film from the 80s, and that the complaints when it came out were actually mainly caused by the film's advertising rather than its own content, but the controversy is nevertheless what the film is remembered for nowadays.
- Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: The Pseudonyms's deletion of good films from existence gradually makes Karim and Gilles dumber and increasingly incapable of debating and enjoying good movies, for instance Karim is horrified to learn about Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 in Episode 9 and the possibility of every film becoming like it because of the Pseudonyms, but only 2 episodes later, he mentions he actually likes the aforementioned Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 and finds Goodfellas awful even though it used to be his favorite movie before the Pseudonyms made him forget it. When Kamel asks him and Gilles to explain why they didn't like Goodfellas, they can only come up with nonsensical reasons ignorant of basic filmmaking rules, and Karim eventually refuses to argue further and just insults Kamel.
- Plot-Irrelevant Villain: Professor Kung-Fu is meant to be the Villain of Another Story, he has no involvement whatsoever in the show's plot and only appears in the opening of Episode 1.
- Police Brutality: Even though the Cerberus's legitimacy as a policeman is questionable, the trope is invoked when he coldly asks "Papers, please" and then shoots through Karim's hand.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
- Karim and Kamel are alternate selves, but both movie buffs. However when Kamel mentions stuff like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Karim doesn't even know who Steven Spielberg is. While the show first leads you to believe it's because they're from different universes and there's no Spielberg in Karim's, it turns out the possessed Jérémy and Loony Mustached Operator are somehow erasing good movies from existence, leading to Karim and the whole world not remembering that they even existed.
- In Episode 11, Gilles doesn't know Finding Nemo anymore and when Kamel asks him if he's seen it, Gilles believes Kamel is talking about Jules Verne.
- Poster-Gallery Bedroom: The show's set is covered in film posters, which notably gradually disappear in Episode 11 due to the Pseudonyms deleting good films from existence before reappearing in the finale after Kamel and Gilles start remembering good movies again.
- Prayer Is a Last Resort: Played for laughs in Episode 6, when Kamel starts saying the Lord's Prayer when he sees Mac and Me's ugly aliens.
- The Prima Donna: Karim often behaves as one, for instance he makes up flimsy excuses to refuse to let Kamel review Silent Night, Deadly Night at first, obviously because he doesn't want to be upstaged.
- Proscenium Reveal: The first few seconds of Episode 6 are exactly the same as Episode 5's... then someone pauses it, revealing we're actually watching viewers watch and react to Episode 5.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: During the conclusion of Episode 6, Gabriel Fauré's Pavane
plays in the background. - Punny Name: A translator named France Lassionnote appears in a gag in Episode 5.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The Pseudonyms can possess humans after drinking their blood and replacing it with urine. They're never shown to interfere with films directly and only do so through the humans they possess, why they bother to possess them in the first place is unclear.
- Put on a Bus: Unlike the rest of Kamel's team, when offered by Arturo to go to Karim's world Gilles Stello isn't interested and refuses to leave, he isn't seen again afterwards in the show's chronology, although he reappears in Episode 10, which is set before Episode 3.
- Questionable Casting: Played for laughs in Episode 4, where Karim did this in-universe when he made his Dragon Ball Z fan film, in which Son Goku is played by Jérémy, who is bald.
- Rapid-Fire Comedy: The combination of Karim and Kamel's trademark fast speech with the increased presence of Gilles and Jérémy compared to Crossed makes it hard to even notice all the jokes in one viewing. Episode 6 in particular features constant comedic censorship that eventually covers the entire screen with dozens of Charleses and replaces every other word Karim says with a melodica sound.
- A Rare Sentence: In Episode 8, when Karim gets to say "Rob Schneider whips Jean-Claude Van Damme's ass with an eel during a rickshaw race", he's understandably astonished.
- Real Time: It's implied that the same amount of time separates the episodes in-universe and in real life.
- Red Filter of Doom: In Episode 8, the introduction features the possessed Jérémy erasing many movies from existence in a room, the whole scene being filtered in red.
- Retcon:
- The pitfalls of this trope are discussed in Episode 3, which fittingly ends with a massive example of it: while Crossed treated Kamel as Karim's second personality, Chroma reveals they're different individuals, which contradicts a few gags. Another contradiction is that in Chroma, Karim and Kamel deliberately wear slightly different outfits to help everyone tell them apart, but in Crossed, they wear the same outfit.
- Furthermore, the show is confirmed to be set before Crossed but the timeline doesn't add up, as Episode 10 is explicitly stated to be set in 2017 even though the episode of Crossed where Doom (2005) is reviewed dates itself to before the French release of Pain & Gain (2013), September 2013, since Karim calls it "Michael Bay's next film".
- Ret-Gone: Under the Pseudonyms' control, Morvan and the Loony Mustached Operator make good movies vanish from existence in Karim's universe, so the crew and supposedly everyone forgets about their existence.
- Retraux:
- Episode 12 starts with a short episode of Chromatographe, a spiritual ancestor of Chroma which is Deliberately Monochrome and digitally aged.
- The show's website had an Endless Game with simple pixel art graphics in which Jérémy had to survive waves of goblins.
- The Reveal: Episode 3 reveals the existence of parallel universes, allowing Karim Debbache to converse with an alter-ego, Kamel Debbiche.
- Revealing Continuity Lapse: In Episode 12, Carnosaur has continuity errors causing Doc's sunglasses to disappear and reappear between shots. This is mocked in a gag where Karim suddenly also gains sunglasses from nowhere and is happy to learn that Doc is a fellow disappearing sunglasses sufferer.
- Rewatch Bonus: For all its silliness, the show’s plotline actually contains quite a bit of foreshadowing, referencing and subtle details that becomes more obvious on second watch:
- In episode 1, Morvan off-handedly mentions that Pseudonyms "drink your blood and replace it by urine" (which sounds like just a throwaway joke but becomes a plot point later on).
- Kamel Debbiche doesn't say his name at the start of the third episode and the background is red this time, hinting that he's not Karim Debbache and the episode is set in a different universe.
- In episode 6, Morvan has a bandage on his right hand, after being wounded in his fight against Morvain in the found-footage section of episode 5.
- In episode 11, you can see the movie posters in the background gradually disappearing as the Loony Mustached Operator and Morvan keep erasing good films from existence (and since "all films are linked together", some films disappearing means that others never get made). In episode 12, as Karim and Gilles start remembering good movies, the posters also start reappearing.
- Riddle for the Ages:
- Many. Why is Karim's team already familiar with traveling to other universes? What are the Pseudonyms? Why do they want to erase good movies from existence? Why do they possess people to do so? How did Morvan know about them? Who is Arturo? Why did he choose to send Kamel's team to Karim's universe? Why does he disappear after that? Why can Archimed Kebab's reel undo the Pseudonyms' Great Substitution? Why did he make it? Why did he leave riddles to find it? What exactly is the Cerberus? Is he the same character as the cop from Crossed? What was the message Morvan was supposed to bring to the team before Morvain killed him? Why is everything so different from Crossed? It's hard to tell whether these questions were meant to be answered in future seasons.
- Who Professor Kung-Fu even is and why he fights the crew in Episode 1 is an intentionally plot-irrelevant example.
- Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Episode 2 tells the story of John McTiernan's conviction for perjurynote , which destroyed his career and reputation in a failed attempt to save Rollerball from being ruined by Executive Meddling. Karim also points out that because of the Statute of Limitations, McTiernan wouldn't have been condemned if he had just told the truth.
- Rooting for the Empire:
- Running Gag:
- Morvan, the Loony Mustached Operator and Karim all get their right hands wounded at some point (by a flag-shaped cup, a razor-sharp DVD and a gunshot respectively).
- Whenever something doesn't make sense in Highlander 2, Kamel explains what's going on in one word: "Zeist".
- In Episode 2 and 12, Karim begins grandiloquent speeches (the former about Morvan's quest for knowledge about the Pellicano affair and the latter about the authorities finally arriving to save the day at the end of Carnosaur) full of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, but both times, he's suddenly interrupted (the first time by Morvan having finished his research, the second by the end of the film unexpectedly revealing the authorities are not here to save the day).
- Sarcastic Clapping: Stello starts doing this in Episode 10 after Kamel mentions Gremlins is a great film partly because... it's well-made. But he and Morvain then start beatboxing and the scene turns into a gratuitous musical number for a few seconds.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Jérémy Morvan quits in Episode 6 after Karim rudely rejects his theory about Mac and Me, and is replaced with Jérémy Morvain.
- Self-Deprecation: In Episode 1, Karim claims that he makes his videos because he has a "rather sad" life.
- Sequel Hook: The last scene of the final episode features the Loony Mustached Operator appearing in the frame.
- Sequelitis: Discussed in Episode 3, where Kamel points out that making a sequel is much harder than directors and producers commonly believe because of the risk of ending up with Fan Disliked Explanations or, worse, Series Continuity Errors.
- Serious Business: Gilles tells Karim he's going too far when he compares M. Night Shyamalan's failing career to the French singer Loïs Andréa's in Episode 4. When Karim says "as finished as Loïs Andréa's career" in Episode 6, Gilles is offended again.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Karim and Kamel sometimes engage in it, for instance in Episode 7, when Karim is annoyed by a lengthy scene that keeps showing newspaper sellers shouting that Vidocq is dead even though it was already shown in the previous scene:"You know, film, if I didn't blindly trust your intellectual honesty, I'd tend to be a little suspicious regarding the veracity of the information you bust your lungs shoving into our brains numbed by your unbridled pacing."
- Shout-Out:
- The storyline involving parallel universes is a parody of Sliders, Arturo's name is also a reference to this show and he quotes its opening when he contacts Kamel's world at the end of Episode 3.
- The aesthetic of the show's set is a homage to Suspiria (1977).
- In Episode 1, Karim calls Troll 2's goblins "Ewoks".
- In the same episode, he observes that Shocking Dark pretends to be Terminator 2 but is actually a ripoff of Aliens and quips that it's legal since 2 ripoffs cancel each other. Jérémy promptly puts on Mickey Mouse ears and a Ghostface mask and asks whether it's legal to feature them as long as they're worn together.
- Still in the same episode, he calls Elliot and his friends the "Power Rangers".
- In Episode 2, Jérémy is briefly seen reenacting the Alas, Poor Yorick monologue from Hamlet.
- Episode 3 starts with Kamel and Morvain in a hoodie playing chess on a beach in a homage to The Seventh Seal.
- In the same episode, to make a point about the difference between a film's events and its setting, Kamel shows a short film titled Star Wars: Episode XIX – The Chill Menace.
- Still in the same episode, he calls General Katana's hitmen "the hyenas from The Lion King (1994)".
- Still in the same episode, when he learns about Enron's real-world villainies, he claims that this must be the Bad Future where Biff won.
- In Episode 4, to check whether they're actually Thinking the Same Thought, Karim and Kamel simultaneously quote Gogeta.
- In the same episode, Karim is about to quote La Haine to describe how M. Night Shyamalan's career took a turn for the worse, but Kamel finds the reference overdone and threatens to kill him if he finishes his sentence, prompting Karim to do a Last-Second Word Swap and instead quote French singer Gilbert Bécaud's song L'important c'est la rose.
- In Episode 5, Karim's alarm clock rings at 9:28, a subtle reference to The Room (2003).
- The way Pseudonyms possess people is reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and the ending of Episode 5 is a homage to the film's Twist Ending.
- The opening of Episode 6 is a homage to the opening of Zodiac (2007), complete with the same music.
- In Episode 7, Karim calls Guillaume Canet's character "the Mad Hatter".
- The opening of Episode 9 is a parody of the blood test scene in The Thing (1982).
- In Episode 11, Jérémy keeps asking what's in the mysterious box Kamel found in the previous episode, and Kamel has to remind him he's not David Mills.
- In Episode 12, Karim calls the master of the Pseudonyms "Splinter" and the character played by Ned Bellamy "Élie Kakou", after a French comedian who resembled him.
- Show Within a Show: Episode 12 starts with the team watching a brief episode of Chromatographe, the show Archimed Kebab hosted in the early 20th century, in which he analyzes the 1900 silent film Grandma's Reading Glass.
- Shown Their Work:
- The show is very well researched, Karim and Kamel quote and recommend a variety of books and articles throughout the reviews.
- In Episode 12, Archimed Kebab mentions that Georges Méliès fell into oblivion. While Méliès is nowadays acknowledged as one of the most influential filmmakers in history, his work was indeed forgotten for decades before being rediscovered and would have been obscure during Chromatographe's era.
- In the same episode, Kamel correctly identifies several Garbage Pail Kids cards in the background of a shot of Mac and Me. Which is quite impressive, considering that they're barely visible and the shot only lasts a few seconds.
- Significant Anagram: Chromatographe is hosted by Archimed Kebab, whose name is an anagram of Karim Debbache.
- Similarly-Named Works: Invoked. The Troll 2 review starts with a mention of House 5, from the same director, and a long and confusing list of films that have similar names and serial numbers without being related to each other. He later notes that Troll 2 isn't a sequel to Troll either. And then the list continues.
- In the Carnosaur review, he makes another comically long list of films titled some variation of "Dead/Alive".
"Peter Jackson’s BrainDead had to be renamed Dead Alive for its release, not to be confused with Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive 2, Dead or Alive Final, Wanted Dead or Alive − the film not the series −, Wanted - Dead or Alive, Hell’s Fury: Wanted Dead or Alive, Dinosaurs Dead or Alive, Hitler: Dead or Alive, Alive or Dead, More Dead than Alive, The Dead are Alive, or Dead or Alive. They called it that lest people get it wrong." - Slasher Movie: Extensively defined and discussed in Episode 9, in which Kamel also mentions this subgenre's spiritual ancestors such as Giallo films.
- So Bad, It's Good:
- Discussed at length in Episode 1, as Karim analyzes why exactly Troll 2 is considered a bad movie even though it's very enjoyable thanks to how hilariously poorly made it is, and explains why he believes his viewers should all watch it.
- Kamel is amazed by the improbable "Fairytale Ending" of Highlander 2 and claims that it alone makes the film worth watching.
- So Bad, It's Horrible: Also discussed in several episodes, especially in Episode 6, in which Karim explains that he considers that unlike Troll 2, Mac and Me is just atrocious and not worth watching because it completely distorts the meaning of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the film it plagiarizes, with constant Product Placement and the entire removal of the Coming of Age Story elements of E.T..
- So Bad, It Was Better: Kamel points out that Highlander 2's Renegade Cut is less funny than the theatrical version since it removes the most laughably incoherent part of the plot, Zeist. Worse, it fails to tell a more coherent story despite this change.
- Soundtrack Dissonance:
- Joy To The World plays in Episode 1 while Karim, Gilles, Jérémy and Professor Kung-Fu beat the shit out of each other.
- A scene of Mac and Me where Mac is stuck in a tree and barked at by dogs contains the completely irrelevant song Take Me I'll Follow You, so Gilles starts mocking the absurdity of the scene by inserting himself singing along in it for no reason, and Karim and Morvan promptly join in.
- The ridiculously anachronistic end credits music of Vidocq is mocked by Gilles and Jérémy doing a silly dance in tacky 19th century outfits.
- Speak in Unison: Karim and his alternate self Kamel do that occasionally, even quoting Gogeta together to bond.
- Special Effect Failure: Expectedly mocked in the reviews of several bad films, especially Mac and Me.
- Spiritual Antithesis:
- Episode 4 is one to the Nostalgia Critic's review of Signs, with many of Kamel's points seemingly specifically rebutting the Critic's, for instance Kamel points out that the aliens' hackneyed designs are intentional because they're based on testimonies from people who claim to have seen aliens in real life.
- Overall, the show is one to the Caustic Critic archetype of many Video Review Shows the aforementioned Nostalgia Critic inspired: merely bashing movies is depicted as the wrong approach in the episodes where Kamel and Karim disagree, and they pan most of the films they review but do so to prove important points about filmmaking.
- Spoiler: Every episode tells the reviewed film's entire story (and, in Episode 3, Highlander's for the convenience of the viewers who haven't seen it) without spoiler warnings, with the sole exception being Troll 2, whose ending Karim doesn't reveal because he wants viewers to see the film themselves.
- Spotting the Thread:
- In Episode 6, Kamel realizes that Morvan is Not Himself because unlike Karim and Stella, he knows about E.T. even though the residents of his universe are supposed to have forgotten it because of the Pseudonyms.
- In Episode 8, Karim becomes suspicious of the Operator because when Karim concludes that he considers Knock Off a good film, the Operator claims to have never seen it in order to take it away and turn it into a bad one, contradicting himself since he was the one to give it to Karim in the first place.
- Standalone Episode: Oddly enough, Episode 2 is the only episode of the show to involve neither the Pseudonyms nor the parallel universes, and apart from a reference to Morvan's pin collection in Episode 12, none of its events are ever relevant to the following episodes.
- Starting a New Life: The final episode ends with the team having to change their identities and flee to another country because Morvain is wanted by the police for the murder of Morvan.
- Stealth Prequel: While Chroma poses as the Spiritual Sequel of Crossed with more budget (although the movies reviewed in Chroma aren't about video games, unlike in Crossed), it's gradually revealed that it's actually set before Crossed, that Karim and Kamel first met in their review of Signs and that the Jérémy Morvan in Crossed is actually Jérémy Morvain, while the real Morvan is Dead All Along.
- Stylistic Suck:
- The segments where Gilles and Jérémy tell how movies would end if their plots made sense are made with crude Hand Puppets.
- Karim and Gilles are both shown to be terrible at drawing, and some segments use their badly-drawn illustrations.
- Basically every time someone has to wear a costume, the team went with the cheapest, tackiest they could find.
- Episode 4 shows part of a Dragon Ball Z fan film Kamel claims Karim directed featuring Gilles and Jérémy in ridiculous costumes poorly imitating martial arts.
- Jérémy wears a hysterically bad demon costume for a gag in Episode 5, you can see the plastic horns bend when Gilles headlocks him, you can also see the rubber band holding them in place, and if you pause at the right time, you can see that Jérémy's red makeup leaves stains on Gilles's hands.
- In Episode 11, Morvain shows Kamel an awful video he made starring himself playing 2 characters in bad wigs and blending quotes from Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the Bullet Time from The Matrix with awful English subtitles and My Heart Will Go On playing in the background. When he asks for feedback, Kamel answers by kicking the screen.
- Surprisingly Happy Ending: In the last episode, after all the great movies reappeared, Kamel makes a lengthy speech about the roots of cinematography but when he says that as long as there are people to go watch movies and talk about them, whatever the film, cinema will continue to exist from the most disgusting crap to the ultimate masterpiece and...Kamel: And everyone wins.Karim: But if everyone wins, no one loses!Kamel: Bingo!Karim: Then, we won!Kamel: Tringo!Karim: Cool! Let's party! (cue everyone partying)
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Discussed when Karim points out that Carnosaur's Downer Ending, where the army kills all the survivors in the contaminated zone instead of rescuing them and burns the whole place down along with their bodies is much more realistic than the rest of the film, which makes it unexpectedly impactful.
- Take That!:
- In Episode 3, Kamel explains that Christopher Lambert refused to return for Highlander 2 without Sean Connery even though bringing the latter's character Back from the Dead obviously created massive Plot Holes and continuity errors, and calls him out on dragging Connery into this mess. Lambert immediately retaliates by insulting him on Twitter.
- Lambert afterwards adds that Hercule et Sherlock, a terrible French film involving dogs he was in, is better than Beethoven. Morvain is surprised that Lambert still hasn't let this go.
- Still in Episode 3, Kamel claims that Biff in Back to the Future Part II is Donald Trump.
- Episode 4 mocks the French actor Samuel Le Bihan's wooden acting with a barely animated deepfake of him.
- Still in the same episode, Karim compares M. Night Shyamalan's failing career to the French singer Loïs Andréa's and alludes to the latter again in Episode 6. Both times, Gilles is the only person offended.
- Episode 6 depicts the government ordering the team to censor their foul language because a Twitter user found the fart joke in Episode 5 offensive.
- In the same episode, when Karim mentions that the aliens' diet in Mac and Me consists of Coca-Cola, Kamel quips that it explains why they're so hideous.
- In Episode 8, if you look closely during the scene where Morvan turns good movies into rip-offs, you can see that Blade Runner turns into The Fifth Element.
- Technicolor Fire: The villains of Knock Off use bombs that produce green flames for some reason, Karim mocks them by showing he can do the same thing with nothing but his Euro 2016 lighter.
- Tentacled Terror: The only parts of the Pseudonyms we get to see are their slimy tentacles.
- Terrible Artist:
- Like in Crossed, Karim keeps badly drawing sphinxes for no reason.
- Gilles is shown to be an awful painter in Episode 7, where Karim compares Vidocq's artistic choices to Gilles's ugly paintings. Gilles seems to believe he's great and gives ridiculously pretentious and nonsensical titles such as "Seventy-Two Corpuscles of an Ephemeris of Fortune" to his paintings.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: While we don't get to see Karim and his friends defeat Professor Kung-Fu once and for all, the last shot we see of their fight is Karim's team about to finish him off with a chair, a hammer and an axe. Simultaneously.
- They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
- One of the reasons why Karim pans Mac and Me so mercilessly is that absolutely everything in it is lifted from E.T.. He's especially displeased because the Pseudonyms had made him forget E.T.'s existence, so he watched Mac and Me unaware that E.T. even existed and only found out afterwards thanks to Kamel, who somehow brought a copy of E.T. from his world.
- Episode 7 subtly accuses Vidocq of copying Citizen Kane's plot in the Dream Sequence before the review, and in Episode 8, when Morvan erases Citizen Kane from existence, it turns into Vidocq.
- While reviewing Silent Night, Deadly Night, Kamel argues that many slasher movies are bad partly because they copy many elements from Halloween but distort them by removing their context and the point John Carpenter wanted to make.
- Thinking the Same Thought: Happens several times to Karim and Kamel, especially when they first meet in Episode 4, they even play Street Fighter II together, both pick Ryu, use the exact same moves against each other and eventually knock each other out.
- Third-Person Person: In the announcement video of the show's crowdfunding campaign, Karim mentions in the third person that he likes talking about himself in the third person.
- Toilet Humor:
- Karim compares what John McTiernan's Rollerball ended up being turned into by Executive Meddling to "...a meal eaten, then vomited, then eaten again by someone else, then vomited again, then eaten again, then vomited again, then eaten again, then shat, then...".
- Jérémy makes a fart joke in Episode 5, which is deemed so offensive in-universe that Karim orders him to leave the set, people protest on Twitter and the government orders the team to censor Episode 6.
- Trope Codifier:
- Kamel uses this very term to describe how Halloween was the trendsetter for the Slasher Movie subgenre even though it didn't invent it.
- Karim points out that The Blair Witch Project was one for Found Footage films but definitely wasn't the oldest example. He also mentions that interestingly, while it was very successful, it wasn't the trendsetter, Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield, [REC] and Paranormal Activity were, even though they came out nearly a decade later.
- Unabashed B-Movie Fan: Karim and Kamel both admit they like some B-movies many hate, Karim in particular shocks everyone by stating that he likes Knock Off.
- The Unfought: The team never fights the Pseudonyms directly, and Morvain is the only one to even see part of one without getting possessed.
- Uniformity Exception: In Episode 3, when Kamel explains that Connor is now The Chosen One, he compares him to Jesus, Superman, Neo and the French politician Édouard Balladur, he then challenges the audience to spot the odd one out. The answer is Superman, because he's the only one who wears tights.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: Multiple viewings may be necessary to even notice every gag and to understand the whole plot, what with the 2 universes and their different timelines and the fact that Karim's team and Kamel's are nearly indistinguishable.
- Villain of Another Story: Professor Kung-Fu is meant to be an enemy of Karim's team in a nonexistent adventure set before Chroma.
- Visual Pun: Many, they're generally untranslatable. For instance, in Episode 2, while Karim mentions "Hollywood's upper crust", we briefly see a gratinnote with "Hollywood" written on it.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Happens twice to Gilles, first when he sees the hideous aliens in Mac and Me in Episode 6, then when he learns that Karim likes Knock Off in Episode 8. The second time, Karim points out he should have this looked at.
- Voodoo Shark: Kamel points out that not only do none of the reveals about the immortals in Highlander 2's Theatrical Cut make any sense, but that the Renegade Cut's attempts to improve them also fail to make the film more coherent and just raise more questions.
- Wait Here: In Episode 10, once the team locates the Cerberus, Karim tells everyone to just wait for him while he confronts the Cerberus alone, since he considers himself The Hero of the show.
- With Friends Like These...:
- Karim argues with Kamel basically whenever they aren't Thinking the Same Thought and berates Morvan so often (and even fights him with a nunchaku in Episode 1) he eventually quits, Morvan is shown in Episode 1 to also be willing to beat the shit out of Karim and Gilles when he's really pissed off, and when Arturo is sucked into a portal in the same episode, nobody tries to help him or even notices he's missing.
- Conversely, this trope is averted in Kamel's world, where he and his friends all perfectly get along, although Kamel still calls Morvain crazy in Episode 3.
- Who's on First?: When Karim asks Jérémy to write an opening about Pellicano
in Episode 2, Jérémy writes one about pelicans in Spanish. - Who Writes This Crap!?:
- In Episode 5, Karim explains that lots of studios started making Found Footage films to question how the audiences relate to motion pictures... then realizes that can't be right, checks the script, disagrees with it and states that the explanation is much more obvious: they can make a lot of money while being very cheap to make.
- When the Floutix, the blurring machine used to hide the product placement in Mac and Me, is overwhelmed and breaks down, Jérémy tells Karim "the Floutix conked out". Karim is shocked to hear such a lame line in his show, checks the script to see whether it was actually written in it, and is surprised to find out that it was.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Episode 10 mostly consists of Jérémy Morvain remembering the first episode of his universe's Chroma, the whole review of Gremlins happens in his flashback rather than in the present.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
- In Episode 3, Gilles and Jérémy point out that since General Katana knows the only way to kill Connor and Ramirez is to behead them and also knows that the henchmen of his ally Blake managed to shoot them enough to briefly incapacitate them, all he had to do to get rid of Connor and Ramirez was to have the henchmen behead them next instead of just leaving them for dead.
- In Episode 9, Kamel points out that the guy who manages to briefly knock the killer out in Silent Night, Deadly Night has a chance to finish him off but instead stupidly dies by letting his guard down to make a phone call.
- Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: It turns out that the Pseudonyms' plan can't succeed because bad movies can't exist without good ones, the criteria to judge films are arbitrary and whether they're good or bad, watching them and talking about them is what matters. The team therefore defeats the Pseudonyms without actually fighting them, they just keep making their show as usual until the plan fails and the good movies reappear.
- Word-Salad Humor: In Episode 6, Morvan has to swear he won't fart again but misremembers the overly long and flowery oath Karim makes him repeat and ends up with nonsense.Karim: And I swear furthermore...Morvan: And I swear furthermore...Karim: ...to maintain a balanced diet and a flawless lifestyle so that my next accidental farts are like the songs of a spring nightingale.Morvan: ...to maintain nightingales of my spring lifestyle are like flawless farts of my accidental diet.
- Would Hurt a Child: Played for laughs in the review of Mac and Me, where Karim openly claims that if he had to kill every child on Earth to get rid of the film's disgustingly ugly aliens, he would do it.
- Writer Revolt: Karim believes that Knock Off is an elaborate director revolt, as Tsui Hark seems to have deliberately made the film ridiculous and disrespectful of Americans. Karim's theory is that after Hark was forced by American producers to direct the terrible Double Team, he made Knock Off as revenge against Hollywood.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Karim points out that the figure "infected cells per 1 million: X%" that appears several times in Carnosaur makes no sensenote .
- Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Kamel points out that the scene with the telepaths in Highlander 2 was obviously filmed without a script and the telepathy was just an excuse to add the lines later. He then compares this scene to Cinéman, an infamously terrible French comedy whose dialogue was entirely and blatantly redubbed before its release after negative feedback from test audiences.
- WTH, Costuming Department?: Karim has this reaction when he sees that even though André Dussollier has hair, his character in Vidocq is bald, which means they either had him wear a bald cap or shaved his head.
- X Meets Y: Discussed in Episode 9, where Kamel mentions that Silent Rage, a Slasher Movie starring Chuck Norris, somehow got made presumably because of the belief that mixing 2 popular things will result in a hit. Then played for laughs when he then mentions he stopped believing this after his films Ninja Cheeseburger, Jay-Z Matrix and Star Wars Sardounote all bombed.
- You Are Number Six: Karim calls Morvan "Jérémy 1" to tell him and Morvain apart in Episode 12.
