High Tension

Alexandre Aja
2003

This French rarity is proof that the slasher genre hasn't gone stale, or worse, died. "High Tension" is a clever, well made, psycho flick definitely worth the hour and a half running time. While the film keeps the slasher concept morbidly fun, it never lessens itself by falling for the ever so played head-over-heels cheese tropes of the 80's.

The plot is charmingly simple. Two feisty coeds, Marie and Alexia, head into rural France to get some studying done at the remote home Alexia's family. As the two exchange banal girltalk it becomes clear that Marie has a bit of a lesbian fixation on Alexia, who generally seems content to screw around casually with guys. As the girls bed down a beefy maniac enters the house, promptly murders the family, and takes Alexia hostage. Marie follows undetected, determined to save her love interest cum best friend, while trying to stay alive herself.

There's a few goofy touches here and the extreme color correction is ghastly, but then again, these are pretty much par for the slasher course. The film's real achievement comes from the brilliant special effects makeup by Giannetto de Rossi. This is arguably the most artful and convincing blood makeup of the decade. In this case the effects become a visually powerful aesthetic motif as the film's characters are progressively knocked around and cut up more and more. The film also benefits from Marie's continued refusal to flee for safety in order to rescue her hostage friend. Its a great dramatic device that works wonders for the picture's pacing and tone. Of course another great aspect of the film is the creative use of weapons. While the maniac killer flashes old stand-byes like a straight razor (yawn), Marie upgrades her self defense from kitchen knife to fence-post-wrapped-in-barb-wire, to industrial grade hand-op buzz-saw. Pretty sweet. As far as the twist ending goes, its not exactly brilliant or jaw-dropping but it does manage to wrap the film up nicely and makes sense out of a cold, cruel world.

This isn't the best horror movie of the last ten years or anything, but it certainly can call itself a high quality specimen of contemporary horror.

Review by Brett A. Scieszka