Review of Frontier(s) (2007) by Joshua H — 31 Oct 2009

I love horror. I love to be scared and I like a good old bloodbath just as much as the next guy. With that said, I must say that horror is going in the wrong direction. Horror films nowadays aren't worried about creating scares or instilling a sense of dread in the viewer. Instead, they seem content to just deliver lots of exploitative bloodshed with little to no coherent story. This trend has been seen in films such as Hostel, Captivity, and many others recently. The latest offender is the French horror film Frontier(s). This is a well made, slick looking, piece of trash. But in the end, a slick looking piece of trash is still a piece of trash.

What the hell was this movie about? It opens with a chase scene involving cops shooting at a gang of people who have apparently stolen money from somewhere. Then all of a sudden, the chase is off and they've gotten away scot-free. The police force in Paris must suck! Then the group holes up in a hostel and ends up being killed and eaten by a Nazi family. What? Why? What is the motivation? Is there any rhyme or reason for this to happen? As far as I could tell, no there wasn't. And to top it all off, there's an underground mine system that the family's deformed children live in although they're hardly even used in the film. In fact, I would argue that the only reason they are even mentioned in the screenplay is to have an excuse to have this mine system for the characters to run around and inevitably get slaughtered in. The story is paper thin and obviously took a back seat to the unnecessary and copious amount of violence.

The popular horror website Bloody-Disgusting is quoted on the back of the DVD case as saying that Frontier(s) is, "a heart-pounding, uber-violent and yet thought-provoking horror thriller!" Hardly. I'll agree with the "uber-violent" part. There's no arguing that. But this movie is not heart-pounding due to the fact that it is not scary in the least sense. Less is more when it comes to horror movies. As I've said many times before, subtlety is much scarier and this film basically avoids subtlety at every turn. Everything is shown in its full blood drenched glory and it's not fun to watch. However, lots of bloodshed is just fine if it has some context to it. If there is a bonafide legitimate meaning behind the violence (such as how Scream used graphic violence to create an intelligent and unique twist on slasher movies), then that's fine. But there is no point to this movie. It's certainly not unique at least. In fact, the movie should be called The Paris Cannibal Massacre because the whole time I watched this, I thought, "This is just a worse version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." This film takes so many cues from that landmark horror movie that I began to pay less attention to the events at hand and spent more time playing, "Spot the rip-off.".

As I previously mentioned, I love a good violent movie. But there has to be some kind of reason for it. Newer horror movies are nothing but violence for the sake of violence. It's getting overbearing and it's pulling the genre in the polar opposite direction that it should be going in. That's not to say that there aren't some legitimately frightening newer movies, such as 28 Weeks Later or The Descent, but horror needs to take a trip back to the golden days when it didn't need to rely on excessive violence to scare. Instead, they manipulated the viewers' imagination to make them create their own terrifying experience.

Frontier(s), although well acted, well made, and relatively polished all around, is nothing more than exploitation at its finest. It takes violence and ratchets it up to a sickening and depressing degree. I felt like garbage after watching this film because it seemed wrong to even lay eyes on it. Frontier(s) is a depressing, worthless movie that I recommend anybody with a conscience to skip.