Frontier(s) - Gore-Fest

Frontier(s) is the kind of gory movie I have been avoiding for years. It is a French film with English subtitles from 2007. The plot is interesting. The story is about five young Parisians who pull off some sort of high-dollar (euro) heist and go on the run into the French countryside. Only four of them get out of Paris. They end up at a “deceptively peaceful” inn on their way out of the country – but they never leave the inn. Well, some of them don’t. A weird family of Nazi-cannibals live and kill on this property and the adjacent abandoned coal mine. Frontier(s) marries traditional characteristics of horror movies, with action, and erotic thriller movies. The film serves up cannibals, caves, claustrophobia, zombies, Nazis, guns, bawdy babes willing to have sex with men after knowing them for four minutes, mutes who slaughter (a la Texas Chain Saw Massacre), erotic innuendo when killing, and even a vampire moment that finally kills the last of the “bad guys.”

Of the four Parisians, the pregnant girl is spared. The maniac family knows she is pregnant, even though she isn’t showing, and decides she would be a good wife for one of the Nazi son’s. I was most amazed by the pure gore of this movie. It was just too much for me. The back of the box says, “The French answer to Hostel and Saw.” There were several disappointing scenes where the young Parisians ran into the abandoned coal mine to escape instead of out the darn front door. Running into danger is so aggravating, and since the movie Scream, very obvious and seemingly silly to the audience.

A superb claustrophobia scene makes this worth a watch, but other than that, I don’t think there is much going on here. I went back to look at the post that Tom posted about Faust. We’ve come a long way from the struggle between “good over evil.” This film made me choose between sympathy for either the cannibal-Nazis or the violent, police-killing, bank-robbing, young Parisians. It’s an easy answer, but in a movie like Frontier(s) I think it’s not about good and evil, especially good over evil, but a choice between whom is the least evil. And, of course, how much blood an actor can hold on the outside of their body.