Frontière(s) (2007) / 2022 Revisit

I'll be including the May 29th, 2008 user comments, retiring them on this post. Shudder has an entire set of French Extreme Horror, including Frontière(s), one of my favorites of the mid aughts. Neo nazis on the outskirts of Paris at a hostel targeting robbers who took advantage of political unrest/riots...not any more complex than that. This is about survival, really. Bloodshed and carnage. I forgot about how Xavier Gens shot and had this edited. Frontière(s) really is a film of its time, and a ton of action films (especially featuring Steven Seagal) were "hazard cam", without much in terms of lingering shots on characters or action, a blitzkrieg of chaos and violence a lot of the time. Looking back at my user comments, I still agree that this film never stops to take a breath. It is boom, boom, boom, in terms of moving from one scene to the next. Not even really stretching out scenes where the visitors from the Paris slums interacting very long with the hostel Nazis in any conversation; this is about the Nazis looking to snatch the stolen money and killing the outsiders, except for Testa.

Harrowing, unpleasant, extremely violent French horror hit regarding four Parisians from the slums, who loot a bank during a tumultuous election in Paris where an extreme right governmental take-over seems on the horizon causing riots and unruly conduct by angry citizens plunging the city into chaos, with them taking the wrong turn on a dirt road landing the gang at a hostel containing a secret society of Nazi crazies who murder and rob unfortunate passersby, hanging the dead(..or sometimes, barely living)bodies in storage for safe keeping.

Father(Jean-Pierre Jorris), the Nazi group's patriarch wishes for his son Karl(Patrick Ligardes)to take over as the leader with the rest of the group rather disgusted at the decision. Yasmine(Karina Testa, in a powerful performance), the pregnant female of the four Parisians whose dead brother she left at a hospital in Paris, is chosen as a bride for Karl, after watching her ex-boyfriend, Alex(Aurélien Wiik)shot dead before her eyes. On her own, Yasmine will somehow try to break free from them, hoping to escape, but this will prove quite difficult since she's far from home and on hostile territory.

I rented this based on some serious hype by others that it was brutal viewing, and I must agree. It isn't all that original, though, and clearly modeled after films like "Hostel", where a group unknowingly find themselves in a den of lions far from help, with little place to run, with most of them dying in gruesome ways. As is common place in the slasher genre, the lone survivor against the dangerous brood is a woman. Like "Hostel" or "Wolf Creek", we see what happens to those whose fate led them to this place, and where there possessions are placed. Prepare for the modern technical movie making of today's horror..jump cuts and haphazard camera movements galore. Often the action is sped up and sometimes slowed down(..such as the rain coming down and washing the blood-soaked body of Yasmine). The pace is fast and the film rarely slows down. A major problem many might have is that the ones we're supposed to feel sympathy for are thugs, but I think we certainly can place ourselves in their shoes and grimace at their fates.

Where to begin regarding the cringe-worthy violence:One poor victim's Achilles tendon is pierced with tongs by Father himself, grinning with pride at committing such a sadistic act, proclaiming that's what happened to slaves in Africa to keep them from running away. During a struggle one of the crazies forgets about the ax he was wielding, receiving the weapon into his foot before falling on a spinning table saw. One's head explodes from a shot gun blast. A victim's fingers are taken off by bullet fire. His throat is later slit while hanging upside down(..his feet are penetrated by meat hooks, and we see in a grisly sequence that the ability of a friend to remove him from them was almost impossible) with blood collecting on the floor as the one who committed the act watches almost in a trance. One poor soul's skin is boiled while attempting to hide in a steam chamber. Not only does the film depict explicit violence, we are treated to the result of what these monsters do to people. Setting up in our memories are those corpses..hanging from meat hooks were once living, breathing people with goals and dreams. That could very well be us.