Frontière(s)

I'm assuming you haven't watched the movie already here, so I'm warning/telling you, that this movie will not be for the faint of hearted! It's a horror, it's shocking and it's explicit. But this all starts to happen about half an hour into the movie. So you kinda have learned (maybe even liked?) the characters. That might be a good thing, but it also means that all the pre-story gets thrown away after the mayhem begins ...

If you're looking for gore and terror, this is the only reason for you to watch this movie. There are quite a few scary passages, but there are also a few letdowns, story-wise mostly. The french again try to set a new high (or low, depending on your viewpoint) for gory movies!

This is French horror at its sadistic best. House of 1000 corpses meets Hostel meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Relentless, fast paced action driven by sick/slick characters and by a moody, ominous, sepia-drenched camerawork that makes you want to pause and step out of the room for a breather. Gory but not gratuitously violent, this is Xavier Gens' tour de force, a claustrophobic gorefest of a movie that ranks up there with the best of the genre. Shame the director went from flop to flop after Frontier(s).

Churned out by the New French Extremity Movement, a new wave of French horror responsible for extreme classics like High Tension, Inside & Martyrs, Frontier(s) arrives as another one of their features that aims to break all barriers of censorship or morality by exploiting every taboo subject that's available, but fails to achieve the same impact as its better counterparts.

Set during the violent aftermath of a political election in a near-future France, Frontier(s) concerns a gang of 4 young thieves who decide to run away from Paris with a bag full of robbed money in order to start a new life. While on their way, they decide to check-in at an inn near the border to spend the night but end up discovering that their hosts are actually a group of sadistic cannibals of a Nazi family.

Although the film offers sufficient amount of disturbing content over the course of its runtime, the plot isn't as effective or sturdy enough as it was in Inside or Martyrs, and it is pretty much a disappointment in every filmmaking department. What's even more absurd is the use of Nazi angle to justify its violence because Nazis are inhuman beings after all, by nature or by default.

Direction is a letdown, screenplay is an abomination, cinematography isn't that bad, characters are stupid, performances are over-the-top & violence is mercilessly brutal although not that effective. On an overall scale, Frontier(s) is a blood-soaked gore fest which happens to be political & psychotic at the same time but its poor execution of the available resources never really lets the story take off in the first place.

Homage is a tricky thing–there is an extremely fine line in paying tribute to the cinematic works of others and merely ripping them off (hello, "Doomsday"!). And integrating a whiff of political commentary to give an aura of sophistication to what is, at heart, an unabashed splatter-fest, is even trickier (and much harder to pull of convincingly–see George Romero's "Living Dead" series). Despite how wobbly Xavier ("Hitman") Gens' blood-soaked "Frontier(s)" is in both of these departments, it comes out ahead due to its own maniacal, implacable energy; while prone to including too many monotonous chases that slow up (rather than quicken) the overall pace, there are scenes of such visceral savagery on display that it's hard to take your eyes off the screen. While some of the performances and characterizations veer dangerously close to camp, Gens comes close to establishing the same sort of fever-dream madness that made "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" so endearing: when an extreme right-wing candidate is elected to the French presidency, the citizens take to the streets in protest (the film's opening images are culled from actual news footage); using this as a cover, 5 small-time crooks knock off a bank and meet up at a countryside hostel that just happens to be run by several generations of an inbred, neo-Nazi family (including a patriarch that looks like B-movie king Roger Corman; and a sister who resembles Gen from The Genitortures); what ensues is a survival-of-the-luckiest chase through bowels-of-hell settings that have been well-established in the "Saw" and "Hostel" flicks. Gens also pulls (un)inspiration from the likes of "The Descent" (a fantastically claustrophobic tunnel-crawl; subhuman critters in underground caverns), "High Tension" (the beleaguered heroine spends the last 20 minutes wearing a literal coat of gore), and seemingly every one of the "Texas Chainsaw"s (coming closest to the family dynamic of Part III). While "Frontier(s)" spills its share of the red vino, it doesn't approach the level its reputation would lead you to believe–by comparison, the far more original "Inside" trumps this in terms of jaw-dropping carnage–but Gens instills his violence with such a brutally misanthropic tone that it comes across with more discomfort than catharsis. That being said, there is a bizarre appeal to our protagonists, probably because their initial crime and in-fighting becomes more forgivable in the face of the malevolent menace they bump up against; and the villains are grotesquely charismatic, forming an interlacing network of poison DNA and an undeniable (and undeniably perverse) sense of familial honor. "Frontier(s)" is messy, and certainly no masterpiece, but it makes for a diverting trip into the potential for genre extremity.

Frontier(s) is a fast-paced, very violent thrill-ride from Xavier Gens. While it won't be everyone's taste, for fans of full-on gruesome action it's a must. It's basically a very decent version of 'Hostel' with a couple of thugs on the run from riot-torn Paris who seek refuge at a seedy hotel, unbeknownst what lies ahead. It's not a great film by any means but it is a thrilling one. The lead actress did a great job, but there's also good stuff the actor who played Farid and the actor who played the meathead lunatic. Its style is slick, just what I enjoy watching. Fans of the genre will know what to expect, others may not. But I recommend 'Frontier(s) for a mind-f*ck of a night. ***/*****