High Tension (Switchblade Romance)

< Previous Trailer  |   Add to My Scrapbook  |   Next Trailer >
High Tension (Switchblade Romance)

70% Liked It
liked it

High Tension (Switchblade Roma...

Andrei Finti, Bogdan Uritescu, Cécile De France, Franck Khalfoun, Frank Khalfoun

Students Marie (Cecile de France) and Alex (Maiwenn Le Besco) have no idea of the horrors that await them when they head off to a remote country home to study for their upcoming exams. When night fall...( read more  read more... )s, a psychopathic stranger attacks, tying up Alex and taking her away. It's up to Marie to save her friend -- but first, she must figure out what is really going on. Philippe Nahon co-stars in this twisty-turny tale of terror.

Id: 10893961

Do you want to see this movie?

My Friends Said...

High Tension (Switchblade Romance) Recent Reviews

Register or sign-in to see your friends' reviews !

Recent Reviews

High Tension (Switchblade Romance) Recent Reviews
  • irisheyes686
    November 9, 2009
    irisheyes686
    Once I got past the fact that the movie was dubbed in English - that was annoying at first, it was actually a pretty decent movie...aside from the ending.
  • SirPant
    September 24, 2009
    SirPant
    This is a really good horror film with some really intense scenes. Shame about the really stupid ending though but try and forget about that and enjoy the first 3/4!
  • EarthlyAlien
    September 13, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    "I won't let anyone come between us any more."

    Some filmmakers just can't leave well enough alone. Others don't even try. So it's at this curious crossroad where I find myself both enjoying the unapologetic bloodfest of High Tension and extending certain digits at ...( read more)it for trying to be overly clever. You - Alexandre Aja - had me in the palm of your hand. You really did. Why try to complicate your Grand Guignol when the psychology is going to be flat-out dumber than the age-old slasher vs. victim idea? Is it because everyone else is doing it, or you just wanted to incorporate some cleverness into a bare-bones plot? Whatever the answer is, the fact still remains that, when it comes to the slasher film, it's the blood that triumphs over the brains.

    Photobucket

    A tale as old as time finds best friends and college classmates: tomboyish Marie (Cécile de France) and hard-partying Alex (Maïwenn le Besco) needing to cram for exams. They decide to study at the isolated farmhouse where Alex's parents live. There's nothing to do, nowhere to go and no one to distract them from their work - except a monstrous serial murderer (Philippe Nahon, from Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone) who comes to the door the night the girls arrive. He brutally kills Alex's parents (Andrei Finti, Oana Pellea), her little brother (Marco Claudiu Pascu) and even the family dog.

    Thinking quickly, Marie erases every trace of her presence from the guest room - drying off the sink, making the bed, stashing her weekend bag out of sight - and waits out the slaughter. The phone lines have been cut, there are no neighbours and Alex lies gagged and tied in the back of the killer's rusted, blood-smeared truck, her photo already added to the chilling montage of girls' faces decorating the sun visor. But resourceful Marie refuses to abandon Alex to her awful fate: "those other girls were alone," she whispers. "There are two of us."

    The first two thirds of the screenplay by Aja and co-writer Gregory Levasseur is a relentless exercise in bare-bones nastiness, even if it is so indebted to veteran horror novelist Dean Koontz's "Intensity" that it verges on the actionable. Unfortunately, they squander their goodwill on a non-sense of a twist so preposterous and impossible, it undermines everything that preceded it (though in Aja's defence, it also sets up a stunning final shot). Apparently, the US theatrical release was shorn of a little gore, featuring a partial-dubbing strategy predicated on making Alex and her family Americans living in France. Thank God they're still the only ones who do that; it's easy to see how it must've ruined it completely for them.

    Besides the requisite gore, Aja delivers a truly satisfying cat-and-mouse chase throughout the film. From the house escape to a hide-and-seek at a gas station, the tension is seriously taut and haute and the no-holds-barred use of the corn syrup only adds to an experience that serious horror fans are going to pleasure themselves with. The film has atmosphere to spare. Shot almost entirely at night, it has a bleakness that is truly unsettling. In addition, the killer, who is large in stature, is usually photographed from behind or from the waist down, giving him more of a monstrous, unknown quality than if we were to sit down and have tea with him, like a lot of bad films have us do with their villains.

    Aja and Levasseur (who also designed the film) make expert use of just about every horror film element and setting imaginable - creepy cornfield, shower and shower curtain, toilet cubicles, barking dog, squeaky hinges, slatted closet doors, glimpses in mirrors, ghost story references, a sinister truck, foreboding dreams, barely clothed girls (French of all) in jeopardy, slow-witted cops, straight razors and even a chainsaw. Not to mention several "He's not dead!" moments.

    All of this adds up to a thoroughly effective thriller full of nearly unbearable suspense - some scenes are very hard to watch, since extreme violence from the beginning tells us to expect absolutely anything. In this way, the film is like a pure, stripped-down experimental horror film without any other point. And as such it works brilliantly. The problem - besides the fucking ridiculous twist - is that as the story progresses, another theme develops: you begin to feel that the filmmakers may very well hate women. They're probably just trying to be true to the genre, but this overriding nastiness (much more than simple victimisation) goes way over the line and sours the whole thing. Which is a shame, since they show lots of originality in other areas.

    When the film does work, Aja is ably assisted by the massive presence of Philippe Nahon, who brings the heavyweight baggage of his vile "The Butcher" persona to bear on what is essentially an off-the-peg psycho-slasher villain. While his filthy overalls and shambling heavy-shoed trot recall the Michaels and Jasons of endless Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels, Nahon's methodically grisly dispatching of Alex's family owes more to the spectre of Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and a sequence in which he takes a powertool to a car with intestine-ripping results seems a direct homage to the only memorable scene from TCM 2.

    Maïwenn and Cécile de France do sterling work as Alex and Marie, the latter a particular revelation for anyone who first discovered the talented Belgian actress in the delightful L'Auberge espagnole - where, funny enough, she also played a lesbian. She dominates the screen as the crop-haired heroine who proves more than a match for her predatory male nemesis. It's a terrifically physical performance and a muscular portrait of raw survival instinct that provides an easy point of identification for audience members of either sex - reminding us once again that the purest pleasures of slasher cinema are not sadistic but masochistic, focusing our attention on the trials (and eventual triumph?) of the victim rather than the actions of the aggressor.

    What's at the heart of this male-scripted and directed film but an intense fear and essential misunderstanding of the alien-ness of lesbianism - of the sexual mystery of women magnified by an inward interest that would drive Jungians mad? It's a mean, ugly, sophisticated slasher film with an arrested, maybe tortured, loathing for the conclave of the "weaker" sex - something that undermines the essentially feminist genre (who always wins? Jamie Lee Curtis - and we, an audience of adolescent boys, always cheer) in a way that is simultaneously interesting and plebeian. High Tension is essential viewing even in this watered-down form. It's an almost great film and an almost terrible one. Worthy of four stars until the 75-minute mark and of two for the rest. Out of respect for ancient Greek and Babylonian mathematicians, I have no choice but to give it three stars.
  • DerekA101
    August 24, 2008
    DerekA101
    This movie is a bloody piece of crap!

    First I'm going to justify the 1.5 stars.. the gore. Loads and loads of blood and mayhem. It is well done... very suspenseful and visually stunning.

    Ok, lets forget about my morbid satisfaction in gory films.... This is an awful mess of...( read more) a film. This movie primarily only builds suspense off the music and a semi-effective use of lighting. But it constantly switches between English and then French and then subtitled French, it was very irritating. Choosing one language and sticking with it would've made it seem more organized.

    SPOILER ALERT! ... ok, I'm tired of this "twist"... she's the killer??? A damn schizo... AGAIN!!! I've seen this many times already. Where others mildly succeed, this one fails miserably because of huge plot holes. This twist completely betrays and contradicts everything that made up the first 3/4 of the movie. Some events are unexplainable due to this twist... the lack of clarity makes this movie (and its director) look stupid.

    Unless you love sick, sadistic and over-the-top gory films, then throw back a few beers and watch this film without caring about what's really going on. You won't be disappointed because just about every scene is filled with gallons of blood.
  • 366weirdmovies
    July 3, 2008
    366weirdmovies
    A young student with a butch haircut (no points for guessing what that subtly reveals about her character) travels to a school chum's country home, where a French redneck (or something) starts chopping up the family. Despite some moments of suspense, it's not a thriller as the t...( read more)itle suggests. but a slick slasher movie intended for viewers with strong stomachs.
  • eryri
    December 21, 2009
    eryri
    This was an excellent movie that was badly let down by it's ending and that's a shame as the first 75 mins had been superb and frightening. Gorehounds will love the amount of blood on show here.
  • closedmouth
    December 5, 2009
    closedmouth
    I don't usually watch movies like this, but I'd heard good and bad things about it so I checked it out. There are moments of well-executed tension (as you'd expect, although the title actually translates to 'High Voltage'), and De France gives a good, convincingly terrified perfo...( read more)rmance. It is also very weak in other areas; some sequences are incompetently directed (especially the 20 km/h car chase), the characters are as thinly sketched as you'd expect from a gore film, and the ending, while enjoyably satirical, is poorly revealed, doesn't really make any sense, and is actually quite offensive if you think about it. (I won't say why, that would spoil it.) You'll enjoy this if you love the gore horror genre, but if you think about it for more than five minutes it won't seem so hot after all.
  • sapphireoasis21
    November 22, 2009
    sapphireoasis21
    High Tension is a great edge-of-your-seat horror film with all the right amounts of thrills, chills, gore, and action.

    Two college students take a road trip to a country farmhouse and are turned upside down when a homicidal maniac comes calling.

    The movie was hi...( read more)ghly enjoyable and if you have a low tolerance for anything gory, do not watch, as this is full of non-stop gore. The ending delivered a twist that was shocking, but not the reasoning behind it.

    One thing that sticks out upon watching the English version is the dubbing from the French actors to English. It is noticeable at first, but you quickly get drawn into the movie and don't notice it anymore, especially as French is still thrown in.

    Overall, a very enjoyable movie and a great horror film.
  • djgriff2
    November 20, 2009
    djgriff2
    Intense edge of your seat thriiiiiler...see this it is a keeper! LOL! I LOVED it! That lady student went though hell to get her sanity back from the stalking killer that was on her tail...I loved it!
  • bronzlox1
    November 19, 2009
    bronzlox1
    Scary and gory. Twist ending!
View All Reviews

Opening This Week

Top Box Office

Upcoming Movies

New on DVD