Man, this movie sucked. As it was going along
I thought it was all right – nothing special, nothing awful. Unpleasant, sure,
but that's the genre for you. But then we get to the twist ending and spoiler
alert – the twist is that the movie sucks ass.
HIGH TENSION is a 2003 slasher flick from
France. I actually started to watch it years ago when it first came out on
video and never finished it for whatever reason. I should have left it like
that. I could have gone on being naïve and thinking maybe the ending was good
instead of learning the terrible truth.
The flick stars Cecile De France as a young
woman traveling to her friend's (Maiwenn) parents' (Andrei Finti and Oana
Pellea) country home. Unfortunately once they're all tucked in for the night a
serial killer (Philippe Nahon) shows up and starts slashing.
The killer does not know our heroine is in the
house, so she is able to sneak around, witness the killings, attempt to call
for help, and assure her now bound-and-gagged friend that help is on the way.
She never gets the drop in the killer and
before you know it the whole family (including a little kid) is dead and our
heroine's friend is kidnapped. Our heroine sneaks into the killer's truck and
goes along for the ride.
You might be thinking it sounds like our
heroine is making lots of stupid decisions here and you'd be right. Defenders
of this movie will argue that the twist ending explains why all of these
decisions are not actually as stupid as they initially seem. I'd agree if the
twist ending didn't render the entire movie, as presented to us, as completely
impossible.
Director and writer Alexander Aja decides to
do one of those twist endings where anything can happen in the first 99% of the
movie because the twist negates everything. Instead the twist explaining stuff
that doesn't seem to make sense, it just calls everything into question.
On top of all of that, the twist reveals a
very dated homophobic angle to the proceedings which wouldn't have been welcome
as a premise and is even less welcome when it shows up at the last minute.
After watching the flick I realized the same dude who directed this directed
the PIRANHA flick from a couple years ago which was plagued with aggressive
misogyny so in retrospect this is not surprising.
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