Fear Factor Celebrities | Stupor and tremors

Exactly 25 years ago, in a Precambrian era when the podcast didn’t really exist, host Joe Rogan worked as a comedian and piloted the very first episode of Fear Factor on the airwaves of the NBC channel, where competitors tested their fears of dizzying heights or calamitous beasts, the classic of classics of this show that is both stressful and disgusting.

A quarter of a century later, and after the short interlude Risk factor from Benoît Gagnon to TVA, Patrick Huard takes over the reins of Fear Factor on Crave in its “stars” version, which contains just as many cars suspended 50 feet in the air and hyperactive mice that munch on your face.

Après the recent résurrection of Decorate your life At Canal Vie, we see that this batch of favorite shows from the early 2000s (the famous Y2K trend, which means year 2000) swells like a successful emulsion with Chefs !. The advantage of these retro-nostalgic productions is that they land on the screen with decades of advertisements and memories that are easy to reactivate.

Back to Fear Factor Célébrités. The first two hours will be released on June 5 on the Crave platform and the other six episodes will be added every following week.

If you’ve binged all three seasons of Get me out of here! At TVA, which has disappeared from the schedule of the Québecor channel, you will remain in familiar territory with Fear Factor Célébritésbut with metal containers instead of bamboo huts.

The first episode pits comedian Mariana Mazza, influencer and host Catherine Peach against each other and Mr. Beachclub/Poutine himself, Olivier Primeau. These three competitors compete as a duo with a guest of their choice and the three have chosen to bring their father or mother, it’s adorable.

You can easily guess that Mariana Mazza and her mother Sonia Merhe, 66 years old, speak very loudly, cry profusely and celebrate joyfully, both of them. Exasperated by her daughter’s poor performance in a test that she considers easy, Sonia Merhe gets nervous after Mariana: “Enwèye, tabarnak, stop shouting.” They are endearing in all their intensity.

À Fear Factor Célébritésthe challenges are called stunts and the word has not been translated. So there are three “stunts” per episode and the second always involves disgusting or super anxiety-inducing stuff.

I am thinking here of the test where the candidate sits in a dentist’s chair with a huge Elizabethan collar around his neck, the famous veterinary cone which prevents animals from scratching or licking themselves. Cockroaches, toads or mice are poured into this collar and the person must guess, with their eyes covered, what is working on their face. It’s “fucked up”, to quote Mariana Mazza in the text.

The results of the first episode are truly surprising. A person gives up after 15 short seconds of action and we would never have suspected the extent of their phobias. Several of the outdoor events take place on platforms or cubes hung from huge cranes, which becomes repetitive. Activities involving insects or snakes remain the most profitable in terms of excessive reactions.

Someone who is dizzy freezes or paralyzes, which conveys their fear less clearly, while someone who nearly swallows a cockroach will scream until their lungs are torn apart.

In the second episode, which brings together the actress Ludivine Reding and the comedians Dominic Paquet and Mario Tessier, the underwater cage “prisoner-air” gives a hard time to all the participants, except one, who swims like Simon the Torpedo from Survivor Québec.

This shark cage is submerged in a large pool of water. On the top of the cage, there are only two openings, the size of a dinner plate, to allow competitors to catch their breath. To escape the cage, contestants must dive underwater and unscrew six giant nuts that hold the door in place, and no one is safe from sudden suffocation or a panic attack.

The winners of each episode walk away with $5,000, which they donate to the foundation of their choice. Filming took place last fall at Studios Grandé, in the southwest of Montreal.

À l’urge Get me out of here!, Fear Factor seen as a family. There are cars hanging five stories above the ground that you have to climb, platforms to keep balanced between sky and earth and swear words that Crave doesn’t beep.

And unlike the miniseries Good cop, bad copPatrick Huard does not do somersaults in Fear Factor Célébrités. As a host, the actor and comedian comments on events with empathy and a caring humorous touch.

He is there to support the players, to put them at ease, and not to burden them further. We are light years away from the directive, strict and aggressive tone that Joe Rogan took in the first version of Fear Factor on NBC. And that’s so right, Lord. Some things, like thin scarves and the second Infini-T disc, need to stay in 2001.