Frontiers

Aka: Frontière(s)
DVD review (region 1 & 2)
Directed by Xavier Gens
Starring Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik, Patrick Ligardes, David Saracino
Release date Out now

A gang escape riot-hit Paris with a bagful of stolen money and hide out at an isolated hostel. Unfortunately the place is run by a family of Nazi cannibals…

French shocker Frontiers is better than the majority of torture porn/gorno/survival horror titles to have emerged in the wake of Hostel and Saw (which, for better or worse, are shaping up to be the two most influential horror movies of the 21st Century). At first glance it’s your standard flesh-hotpot of kidnap, torture and rampaging rednecks. But there is at least some attempt at satire behind all this – the movie opens with footage swiped directly from the 2005 Paris riots, and the Nazi family feeding on inner city youths is presumably meant to echo Sarkozy’s comments about “cleaning out” the banlieus.

Director Xavier Gens (who went on to make the blander Hitman) draws as much influence from that other exemplary Gallic shocker, High Tension, as he does US horrors, and while Frontiers isn’t quite in the same league as Alexandre Aja’s nerve-shredder, it’s an atmospheric, scary and very bloody effort.

The thin plot is merely an excuse to string together a series of terrific set pieces - an unbearably claustrophobic crawl through a tunnel that’s as good as anything in The Descent; a character melting inside an oven; Karina Testa’s convincingly shell-shocked Yasmine being stalked by two butchers while freak cannibal children roam around them. What the movie lacks in originality it makes up for in style, and Gens’s juddering camerawork, drained colours and sense of strangeness (always important in a horror movie) marks Frontiers out from the torture pack. Matt McAllister