Frontier(s)

Frontier(s) is a witless horror film in the same vindictive mould as Hostel. It's not only boring but offensive; borderline entertainment.

It's 2002, and France seems to be in the process of electing a right-wing President. Riots duly erupt, and to be fair, the footage of mobs confronting and in conflict with the gendarmerie is thrilling. However, for the most part it's archive footage, and much of it can be found online. Then there's the pregnant protagonist, who basically appears to be an attempt to up the ante for this subgenre, rather than any bold conceit about the greater horrors of civilisation.

In the flames of the Parisian suburbs five friends are dealing with the aftermath of some robbery or another gone wrong. Among them is Yasmine (Karina Testa), trying to decide what to do with her baby, her wounded brother Sami, and her relatively useless ex-boyfriend Alex (Auélien Wiik). We never get the details explained to us, and they don't matter. There's a bag full of money, relationship tension, and a need to disappear, so they bundle into some cars and head for the border.

This being a horror film, of course, they stumble into a nightmare. When blonde barmaid Gilberte (Estelle Lefébure) and her mousy colleague Eva (Maud Forget) make themselves available, Sami (Adel Bencherif) is more than happy to participate, and the ensuing orgy is videotaped by another of his robbery accomplices, Farid (Chems Dahmani). Then there's a charged confrontation with the barmaids' brother Karl (Patrick Ligardes), a local cop, and that which was merely bad becomes stupid.

To save you the bother of watching the film, here's what's going on. Jean-Pierre Jorris is Le Von Geisler, a former SS officer who settled in northern France after the war. Through kidnap, incest, and ritual cannibalism he has built a family to create a new master race. His prey get butchered like pigs or steamed alive. Audiences will be reminded of classics such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, briefly, and then be forced to relive the same tedium that accompanies soulless remakes like The Hills Have Eyes and the gratuitious exploitation top trumps of Hostel 2 and the Saw franchise. There's mud, ludicrous quantities of blood, and bodies. Lots of bodies. There's a room full of dressed meat, a chronologically inexplicable set of "children" who live in an abandoned mine, bitter succession politics amongst the sons of the aforementioned Nazi long-pig farmer, and a really big gunfight that somehow manages to make a blonde firing an MP40 tedious.

Though initially convincing as final girl, Testa is called upon again and again to show the trauma of her ordeal with a sort of twitchy dance that makes her look like supermarionation seen under a strobe light. It's tempting to blame Xavier Gens for the whole mess, but some of the responsibility might have to go to Luc Besson who is serving as producer. That said, Gens previously directed Hitman - but there he wasn't also responsible for the script.

By framing the film with coverage of an extreme right-wing goverment being elected, Frontier(s) might be saying something about the horrors that people will tolerate and the nature of man's inhumanity to man, but it isn't. This would be a derivative waste of time in English, but because it's in French with subtitles it's likely to be off-putting to its natural audience of inebriated adolescents. Resist any impulse to see this film.