Film: Frontiers
Release date: 7th July 2008
Certificate: 18
Running time: 104 mins
Director: Xavier Gens
Starring: Karina Testa, Samuel Le Bihan, Estelle Lefébure, Aurélien Wiik, David Saracino
Genre: Horror
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France/Switzerland
Torture porn: two words that really shouldn’t have been put together, a bit like the combination of cannibalistic Nazis. So when you combine them all together you get some idea of Frontiers’ brutality.
Frontiers begins with a small group of friends who are fleeing Paris, which is going through a rather turbulent time, with a new extremist right wing president coming into power.
During their escape they come across a cosy little motel - cosy if you find Nazi paraphernalia and huge guns appealing that is. Events unfurl, and our merry gang of wannabe political freedom fighters are axed, cooked alive, chained, sliced and shot. No doubt there are many other atrocious acts inflicted upon them, but by the end it all blurs into a big screaming red blotch on your memory…
The violence in this film is as in your face as it gets. No camera cut aways a split second before the gore – and no letup on the fake blood. Despite this, there is a gradual crescendo of violence and bloodletting, which is built up throughout the film, so that by the climax our surviving heroine is doing quite a commendable impression of Carrie.
Hand in hand with the gore is the most interesting side of the narrative, as the evil doers are in fact a very strange and clearly deranged family who have a certain liking to Adolf himself. We have the Nazi father figure and his children, who he seems to have stolen over the years and brought up as his own – adopting them into his little Mein Fuhrer worshipping church. Finally, there’s the mother figure who crops up twice in the film, and does little other than sit in a wheelchair spewing gunk out of a pipe that is poking out of her throat. They are a lovely family unit and they like nothing better than chopping up and eating passersby. This idea of a family carvery does work nicely, and brings a sinister glow over the flat out gore that doesn’t really do much to scare or unsettle.
Despite this, Frontiers appears to steal from a few other horror films, melding them all together into a grotesque 104 minute show. Of course, in its defence, the genre of the horror film is so abundant that it makes it relatively impossible to create a truly original storyline to go along with the scares and bloodshed. The idea of the killer family lends itself to that of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, with Frontiers attempting its own version of the infamous dinner scene, with the incapable grandfather of Texas Chainsaw Massacre being replaced with the mother here. Then we have the usual torture porn comparisons to that of Hostel, and the ramped up gore reminiscent of other recent French horrors such as Switchblade Romance and Martyrs.
The actors and actresses are excellent - the women possessing a disconcerting amount of venom towards the victims while the men convince as towering Nazi brutes with their pecs taking up as much room on screen as their victims’ innards. And speaking of the victims, they are a realistic bunch who don’t whine and moan like the majority of horror film casts do, but boy do they scream, wail and cry. The lead protagonist, played by Karina Testa, maintains a successful level of allegiance between herself and the audience, and makes for a very convincing broken shell by the end of the film. A satisfying crack in her sanity is presented onscreen during the last third of the film, which is punctuated with a loud battle cry during the climax.
A lot better than the usual Hollywood horror fare, however, it certainly won’t satisfy the adrenaline seekers among you who like to be psychologically tested. JCH
