Coming on the heels of the Hostel and Saw movies (and a wave of similar French films like Haute Tension, Them, and Inside), Xavier Gens’ Frontier(s) is one of the better examples of a disreputable genre.
From nuclear-age monster movies to Reagan-era slasher flicks, horror films have been invoking topical politics to prey on mass fears and concerns for years; this survival horror (or ‘torture porn’) sub-genre is no different, following Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib scandals. Ninety minutes of torture, however, makes for rather questionable entertainment.
Frontier(s), upon first glance, seems different: we start off with street riots and a gang of (mostly unlikable) Parisian criminals using them as cover for a robbery.
Politics become murky when they run into the usual Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like clan on their way out of the country, here headed by a German patriarch.
Countless buckets of blood later, I stopped looking for messages; a number of intense sequences and revenge-movie standards, however, held my interest along the way as Yas (Karina Testa) fights back against her captors.
As these movies go, the revenge-fueled climax is pretty satisfactory, complete with axe, table saw, and shotgun violence. But Gens doesn’t know when to quit, and wraps things up with a laughable all-female shootout straight from a 90’s action flick.
And right when I was about to praise actress Testa just for making it through this thing, she spends the final 10 minutes of the movie going through bizarre, unconvincing convulsions in-between offing the baddies.
While the director knows how to pull off a lot of this stuff – including an illogical but effectively claustrophobic tunnel sequence – the film ultimately fails due to his inconsistency, which also produces one of the worst car chases I’ve ever seen. Outside of these transgressions, the film works fine for what it is – which general audiences should avoid anyway.
Graphic violence pervades the film; though rated NC-17 in the US, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, and a lot less sadistic than many of the similar Hollywood-financed films in the genre.
