Review of Frontier(s) (2007) by Michael K — 15 Jun 2009

I had pretty high expectations for this after being 2 for 2 between High Tension and Inside. This could have been a fair TCM knockoff (with a Nazi family instead of a redneck family), if it weren't swarming with problems such as terrible acting, unlikable protagonists, a cheesy, often nonsensical story, horrible pacing, and not a drop of original blood in its veins. This movie is... inspired... so much by TCM that nearly every single second of it is predictable and trite.

Highlights of the above mentioned terrible acting comes in the form of a lead actress who seems to think that pretending to be a zombie with Parkinson's somehow equates to fear, and a Frenchman playing a Nazi who pronounces every single German syllable with an extra "accchh" just to drive home the point that he's an evil Nazi (and in the process manages to sound like Colonel Klink as played by Gerard Depardieu). The protagonists are all brainless douchebags that have ZERO sympathetic quality. If you're going to spend the first 30 minutes of your movie doing nothing but setting up your characters, do SOMETHING with them besides reiterating the fact over and over that they're cardboard dipshits and criminals.

A smattering of some really fantastic gore can't save this movie, or even make it worth wading through the atrocious pacing to get to. You've seen Hostel, you've seen TCM, pass on Frontiere(s).