Illogic dooms gory French horror flick

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, June 9, 2005

Horror movies have been screaming along at the box office of late. Not even low-budget origins (“Saw”) or Paris Hilton (“House of Wax”) can derail the audience’s appetite for gore.

The trend might be tested by “High Tension,” a hardcore offering from, of all places, France. The movie screened in its original French-language version at last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, and distributor Lions Gate has come up with an ingenious way to present the picture to the American multiplex audience – more on that below.

The story is bare-bones basic. At an isolated house in the French countryside, a homicidal maniac slaughters most of the people on the scene.

Two young women witness the events, and survive. The family daughter (Maiwenn) is bound and gagged by the killer; her visiting friend Marie (Cecile de France) manages to elude capture, and stows away in the madman’s van when he puts his prisoner inside and drives off.

The remainder is cat-and-mouse stuff of a particularly bloody and brutal variety. Director Alexandre Aja has pronounced the film his homage to 1970s horror flicks such as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Last House on the Left,” and he’s left no doubt about his willingness to shock.

Some of the early mayhem is effective, and there’s an especially noteworthy soundtrack full of near-subliminal hums and vibrations. Also, it has a capable leading lady in Cecile de France, who was delightful in last year’s “Around the World in 80 Days.” The mad killer is played by creepy Philippe Nahon (“I Stand Alone”).

But illogic prevails. Even when the film gets around to explaining itself in the final 10 minutes, the understandable audience response is, “Now wait just a darned minute.” Severed heads are one thing, but expecting us to make sense of what we’ve just witnessed is really too much.

“High Tension” isn’t dialogue heavy, but the language had to be addressed. The early dialogue has been dubbed into English, under the premise that Marie is visiting her American friend’s family, who happen to be living in France. The sparse dialogue that follows is mostly in French, and subtitled. Now if that kind of ingenuity had been used at the screenwriting level, we might have had ourselves a movie.

Maiwenn (left) and Cecile De France star in “High Tension.”