Subject: review
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:39:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Brian McDonough {mcdonough@*****.com}
To: John Marcotte {john@badmouth.net}
John,
Hope you enjoyed Batman freakin’ Begins, and thanks so much for giving ME High Tension, or in the original French title, “Steaming Piece of Exploitative Crap.” This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and dude, I’ve seen Superman IV.
Here’s your review. Edit this together however you like. I need to write fast — I’ve already lost ninety minutes of my life to this, and only grudgingly do I give it another minute more.
Right, then: High Tension — Let’s get the good stuff out of the way: Star Cecile de France, as apparent heroine Marie, is a decent actress and really, really pretty. Okay, now the bad stuff: There’s no goddamned plot and no goddamned point. There is, however, a hilarious moment three-quarters through where the “filmmakers” realize this and decide to simply mindfuck the audience as a way out. Literally, it was like watching the Chuck Jones cartoon “Duck Amok,” where the hand of the unseen artist simply repaints the setting behind Daffy at whim.
You have to enjoy pointless suffering to enjoy this film. Otherwise, you’ll suffer pointlessly. The movie has no tension to speak of, so the title is unintentioanlly ironic. Characters you don’t care about are murdered at random by a man who is entirely unidentified.
Our killer quickly kills everyone but Marie and her buddy Alex. Alex drew the short straw, and spends the whole movie — after her obligatory nude scene and off-camera rape — chained and gagged.
With no characters left to kill, we know we’re just marking time — an hour of precious time — until the climax. That hour is killed with violence, gory violence that fetishizes women’s suffering and gross-out makeup effects — apparently the only thing they spent money on in this sloppy, amateurish production, which is somewhat dubbed, really badly, and lit with insane indifference to how light works.
There is nothing a person could do with 90 minutes that wouldn’t be better spent than having these numbing images of dumb horror burned into their brain. I suggest you jump the review here, ’cause I’m gonna start “spoiling” things, and caveat clicker.
So Alex is driving Marie, for hours, through the French countryside to her parents’ farmhouse. This is a drive that takes HOURS. At some point in this drive, we cut to a rusty old delivery truck where a man appears to be getting a blowjob from a black-haired woman. Until he drops the severed head out the window before driving away. Yes, it’s gonna be THAT kind of movie.
At the farmhouse, there is much fake tension: Is the father leering at pretty Marie? Wow, Alex popped up in the bathroom mirror awfully suddenly! I’m tense already. Bad dialogue establishes that Alex covets some guy at school who already has a girlfriend. So that, and her subsequent nude scene, assure us that she’ll suffer outrageous horror. Marie is not after men, she may even be a virgin, so we know that she’ll turn out to be a lesbian.
This is underscored when Marie goes out in the dark to sit on the wooden swing presumably built for Alex’ eight-year-old brother. For some reason, there’s a goddamned Kleig light shining down on the swing to give Marie moody and horribly unrealistic lighting as she notices Alex, two or three stories up, taking a shower. We see horsefaced Alice soaping her lovely nude body because there’s a big window right in the shower that not only isn’t frosted or curtained, but is built practically down to the floor so we can get this view from the yard. Those French …
Alex goes upstairs, lies in bed, reaches into her jeans and masturbates. As she does so, the lights of the Bad Guy’s truck approach the house, and we know that Marie’s sexual yearning has summoned, you know, The Spectre of Grisly Death. Sex = Death. This is the horror-movie math. So the Pudgy Deliveryman of Death rings the bell, slashes the father and decapitates him in a fascinating way. Marie hides, but the Bad Guy goes and apparently rapes Alex before killing her mother. With Marie in the room with Alex, Bad Guy chases the small child into a cornfield and shoots him in the back with a shotgun. He loads Alex onto his truck and drives away with Marie hidden back there, too.
Filling up at a gas station, Marie runs in and hides, then Bad Guy comes and talks to the guy at the counter, calling him by name. He puts an ax through the guy’s chest and drives off. Marie steals a car and follows, determined to save Alex.
By this time, you’re so numb with boredom and cheap images of battered Alex suffering that you wish you were in a different movie. The auteurs hear your plea, and send cops to the filling station, where the security tape shows them the attendant getting the ax planted in his chest — by Marie! Twist! Gotcha! HA!
Marie’s crazy — lesbian crazy, so mad with lust for Alex that she has to kill her whole family and chain her up rather than, you know, make a pass at her or something. They’re COLLEGE GIRLS. In FRANCE. I figure Marie’s odds of getting into Alex’s panties the zero-bodycount way would’ve been better than even money.
So now the boring movie is also truly plotless, because the filmmakers have just destroyed the plot. We’re to understand that we’ve been seeing from Marie’s psycho perspective, but in fact everything the Bad Man did, Alex really did, and all the scenes where she’s hiding from him are … well, they’re just totally a weird dream. Fine.
But we saw Bad Guy in his truck getting corpse-head while Alex and Marie were driving to the house. And though the drive was hours, and Marie slept for some of it, and she had no idea where they were going, she still had that blood-spattered delivery truck with pictures of her previous victims. That is very clearly not a hallucination. So where’d the goddamned truck come from? Where did Marie get the locks, chains to bind Alex, and the makeshift gag of chain and industrial rubber tubing?
Once you know Marie is the killer, you can’t make any sense of the final fight scene with him, but at least all the stupid stuff from that sequence (she knocks him down, and checks on him by straddling his chest and leaning close — just for the cheap thrill of him reaching up to choke her) can be dismissed as part of her crazy delusion.
The film has no plot, no story coherence, no theme worth contemplating, and no real thrills or mystery. Worse than all that, it has no wit, no humor, no joy in the wonder of filmmaking, and even the darkest, most murderous film can have that, if it’s not made by cynically exploitative hacks.
So, again, big editor-man, thanks for the plum assignment. Oh, I was supposed to give this some number of stars, right? How about negative stars? A black hole — can you make a huge black hole that sucks away all that is light and good and worthwhile?
‘Cause these French sadists sure can.
Psycho – The original split-personality horror flick.
Aliens – For guys who like buff chicks fighting monsters.
Bound – If you want to see lesbians getting tied up and committing murder, this is a much better way to go — plus, it has Joey Pants.
Superman IV — This isn’t exactly a recommendation, but Brian swears it is at least better than High Tension.
Tags: horror
This is a slasher flick. It’s about stupid white girls getting cut up. That’s the genre. But it’s a great slasher flick. If you hadn’t decided before entering the theater that the experience was going to be horrible it wouldn’t have been. Your review shows open contempt for splatter movies, you could not possibly have enjoyed this one. And that’s ok. But this being a bad movie and you being unable to enjoy it are not the same thing. Viewers that like this style of film will find High Tension on their short list of favorites.
That’s an interesting point, dwarf. True, I’m not a big fan of stupid white girls getting cut up. But that doesn’t absolve a movie from having a coherent plot, say, or halfway consistent lighting.
Your saying it’s a great slasher flick because it strokes your misogyny is as useless as saying, oh, “Attack of the Clones” doesn’t suck — despite wooden dialogue, illogical plotting and embarrassing character “development” — because it’s sci-fi, and it has rocket ships. Ergo, good science fiction movie. Or “Batman Forever” was a good Batman movie ’cause it had Batman in it. Set the bar a little higher, short stuff.
I went into the theater knowing only that “High Tension” was some kind of thriller/suspense/horror film, and I was looking forward to it. I had no idea it was a degenerate, fetishistic piece of sloppily written masturbatory fodder.
My review only shows open contempt for slasher movies if you’re defining the genre as not requiring a narrative, actual suspense, interesting characters or, really, anything but gruesome carnage. If that’s your definition of slasher films, sure, I have open contempt for that.
Sounds to me like someone smoked a “cigarette” they rolled themselves and watched “Lost Highway” and thought – “This is all right, but you know what would make it better? More blood…and ooOOOooo lesbians! Yeah! Lesbians!….”
Unfortunately they knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who had even less brains and actually decided to make it happen.
For the creator of this movie here’s another idea for ya. How about trying to remake “A Clockwork Orange”, but with more sex, and midgets, yeah midgets!…..
Yeesh.
So it’s not possible that you didn’t get it? And now you’re calling me names for enjoying it. If you read the reviews on this film you will see about half are like yours (you complained not once, not twice but three times about the fucking lighting? Get a grip man) and the rest are the people who allowed themselves to be drawn in and frightened by High Tension and, consequently, had a hell of a lot of fun. You are doing yourself a great disservice to assume that anything you haven’t been formally trained to understand and enjoy is best mocked and disregarded. My recommendation to you is to put down the film school textbook, drop the oh-so-jaded urbanite act and actually watch a movie once in a while. You might like it.
Someone obviously isn’t a fan of horror/slasher movies. You say this movie was boring? This movie gets going 15 minutes into it and doesn’t stop until the 85 minute mark. All I can say is to true fans of horror movies, there is finally a new, fresh, griddy horror movie, and it’s called High Tension. Make sure you ignore this persons review. Go see this movie, it’s the best horror film in the past 10 years. Hands down!! Even if you don’t dig the twist, it still kicks serious A$$
High Tension is the best horror movie of the past 10 years?
Only if you ignore:
Shaun Of the Dead
Scream (1-3)
The Sixth Sense
The Others
The Ring
28 Days Later
Bubba Ho-Tep
Dawn of the Dead (remake)
Donnie Darko
Open Water
Joy Ride
The Frighteners
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
The Fly (remake)
King of the Ants
And a bunch of others I’m probably forgetting.
I haven’t seen High Tension…and don’t plan on seeing it. However – based on this review I’d have to argue your point that it’s the best horror film in the past 10 years(?). What about 28 Days Later? That film scared the crap out of me. I’m sure there are others…but that’s the one that comes to mind.
Have you seen High Tension, John?
Nope. But I don’t need to in order to state that it wasn’t the “best horror film in the past 10 years. Hands down!!”
The only way you could legitimately claim that was if there was a general consensus supporting that proposition. There wasn’t.
In general, the movie got bad reviews. And even those reviewers that gave it a marginal “thumbs up” noted the problematic script and the implausible twist ending.
It may not be the worst movie of the past 10 years, but it definitely wasn’t the best.
What a pathetic ComicCon enveloped fanboy.
Attack of the Clones? Is that all you got? Yet another Star Wars reference? You ARE one of those Kevin Smith understudies. Thinking you are a published writer by blogging your hot air onto the internet and actually having some frame of context in your comments are two terribly different things.
And how do “16 Blocks” and “Must Love Dogs” get the exact same comment from completely different bloggers? Is this guy beefing up his very own reviews!? What a complete loser.
[...] “The Descent” is a smart movie in a genre where it’s not just easy, but almost standard, to be dumb. Horror films, like any kind of action-adventure movie, too often let special effects, flashy camera work and surprise plot gimmicks stomp all over plot and characterization and basic logic. Yeah, “High Tension,” you steaming pile of cliché, misogyny and plot idiocy, I’m lookin’ at you. Here, Neil Marshall makes the oldest horror plot — there’s something scary in the dark — fresh and thrilling. The movie delivers the mystery, tension and terror we want in spades while skipping the numbing, often insulting genre tropes that have been blatantly mocked in the “Scary Movie” series. Hell, this is a film in which woman after woman is murdered as brutally as in any film I can recall, yet not only is it not vulnerable to charges of sexism, the film is likely to be praised for its treatment of women. The filmmaker sort of has to do well by his female cast: The only man in the movie drops out of the story in the first five minutes. The film breaks into two parts — first we follow a group of athletic young women onto a spelunking exhibition that goes wrong. Lost in a dark, claustrophobic underworld, they face all the real-world risks and tensions that one character conveniently rattled off before they started their adventure. And the film does so well at creating tension in this wholly realistic manner that it’s almost a shame when, halfway through, the women stumble into the Creepy Monster portion of the story. [...]
High Tension is a great movie…Cecile De France is so hot that the movie was like porn…ne wayz she gave a great performance…sickly twisted and terrifing…see it
For this review I must say…
Thank you.
Thank you, Lord for creating someone who gave a fair and lucid assessment of this horrible film. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I am your biggest fan.
that list john marcotte gave it completely ridiculous. he must be kidding.. Bubba ho-tep? one of the worst horror movie ever made but still a good comedy…just like shaun of the dead and scream….want some real horror movie then check out “les rivieres pourpres” 1 and 2.
anyways haute tension wasn’t that bad..
I watched it. I can’t believe they fucked up the truck logic. I really can’t. You must have reality somewhere – a generally accepted set of rules. Fire is hot. Things drop when you let go…. basic physics, or else characters could die or bleed, etc. Despite these rules, like oxygen requirements or automobiles that use gasoline… it seems it’s very MUCH okay to foreshadow a very REAL truck that plays a crucial role in the story, a truck Marie could not have seen, yet, we are made privy to the decapped BJ.
When a director deceives the audience with fallacious points of view it is unFUCKINGforgivable.
It’s like David Copperfield using video cuts to pull off an “illusion.” If I want that shit, I’ll watch reruns of Bewitched.
I kept waiting for them to SOMEHOW explain where the truck came from. If they had at least panned to Marie’s apartment somewhere that could have showed a framed picture of Alex standing outside at home, next to the old truck. That would have given Marie fantasy material. I don’t ask for FUCKING MUCH. However, if the pictures of previously murdered women were actual trophies then this whole bitch is completely hopeless.
The people who give it high stars are into the violence and are “oh so impressed” by special effects blood pumping. Ya bunch of fucking virgins.
I don’t care how hot Cecile de France is, this was a WASTE OF MY GODDAMN TIME. MIGHT AS WELL HAVE THROWN A DECK OF CARDS IN THE AIR AND WATCHED LAND AND THEN SPRAYED FAKE BLOOD ALL OVER THE PLACE.
YIPPE FUCKING WHOOOOOOO.
It would have made as much sense.
But if you like gratuitous latex layering and gallons of red fluid and not just “improbable” but IMPOSSIBLE plot points…then THIS MOVIE IS FOR YOU! RENT IT NOW!
Too bad Brian doesn’t get involved in the responses to his reviews anymore…