At Home: Switchblade Romance

You drive a woman crazy. You little slut.

Switchblade Romance (or Haute tension as it’s known in France) is crap. I wish (no I don’t) that I could come up with a better way of describing my feelings towards it but I can’t. Most of the  horror films I’ve seen since the turn of the century have failed to come up with the sort of ‘jump in the seat’ type scares despite being filled with awful acts of violence. That’s down to artifice that I can never accept with these types of films.

When two college friends, Marie (Cécile De France) and Alexa (Maïwenn), travel to the latter’s parent’s country house they encounter a mysterious killer who slaughters Alexia’s family in the middle of the night. Alexia is kidnapped with Marie giving chase in order to prevent the maniac from killing again.

There’s a whiff of Hitchcock’s Psycho in this film (and a visual nod to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and like the former Switchblade’s narrative is unsatisfying (feel free to disagree about that). The twist is stark raving mad and it destroys the film’s logic as a result. Perhaps that’s the point and the script could get out of jail with a few carefully placed moments of dialogue but it’s a shallow and confusing attempt at misdirection. The resolution is meant to be a shocking; I just rolled my eyes in disappointment.

There’s so little connecting tissue between the realities the audience confronts at the end to the one we’re presented to in the beginning that it’s too big a leap to fully accept. Although there’s a hint of some conflict, director Alexandre Aja (Piranha 3D) is too subtle with it, inserting a throwaway line that’s easily forgotten when the blood starts to gush. The twist is sharp and abrupt and if given a decent build-up could have worked. Instead it flails about in a pool of its own stupidity.

Even before the twist there’s a certain degree of preposterousness to what’s happening, making certain moments incredibly contrived just to keep the momentum going (the petrol station scene is daft and the twist just creates more problems for it). The film goes for effect rather than reason, believing a clever twist will suffice when it’s so, so distractingly silly.

If you’re a gore hound then Switchblade Romance has heads chopped off and limbs removed by the bucket load but everything happens with little reason, little cause and effect. It isn’t suspenseful although it tries to be. It relies on a malignant, unexplainable evil, hoping the presence of such a thing is enough to unsettle before you shit your pants. I don’t buy it and I’m not enamoured by films that employ cheap tricks instead of using some intelligence. Switchblade Romance sums up why I’ve never come to appreciate modern horror with its schlocky, violent thrills substituting carefully tuned tension and characters you’re interested in. Horror has little meaning if you don’t care for what’s happening on screen.

4/10

Review: Triangle

Spoilers for the following film

This film would make a pretty good double bill with Black Swan…both films follow disaffected women and their isolation from reality. There are a number of similarities between the two and I would say that this film is probably a little more ambitious, a little more unconventional in its structure and like Black Swan its denouement is a downer (if not more so). If I were to say which one was the better out of the two I would say Black Swan but only because I find Triangle an infuriating film to watch for the best of reasons.

It would be hard to get into a discussion of Triangle without revealing some spoilers and since this is a film where the story is tightly woven around its structure and dependant on the viewer knowing very little; if you haven’t seen the film it would be best to stop reading now. The film is good but I find it so intriguing that it would be hard to look under its hood without revealing some of its mechanics.

Belated Review: Let Me In is an intelligent horror well worth your time

“You have to invite me in.”

It’s the film that didn’t need to be made. I was against the remake from the off not because I felt it was destined to be some Hollywood abomination; rather, it would have the same impact at the box office as the original did. Let the Right One In was a very good horror film and much more compelling than Hollywood’s recent vampire output. The setting, mood and performances of the child actors were excellent. So as a friend and I entered the screening room already a little late (but managing to get there to see that annoying Gulliver’s Travels Orange ad) and realised we were the only ones there, alarm bells were ringing in my head. The film had been out for just under two weeks, it was an evening screening and here were the two of us sitting in the auditorium waiting for the film to start.

This film deserves so much better than that.

Review: Predators is a pulpy sci-fi B movie

Good lord you're ugly

“They can hear you. Smell you. They see you.”

 

Predator like the Alien franchise has suffered a bit of late. After Predator 2 (shh…it never happened) and the AVP films (shh…they never happened) sapped the credibility of the franchise, it was in need of a pick me up. The original Predator is not a stunning film; you could well argue that seen today it’s not even a good one. It’s an enjoyable one with plethora of great quotes (“I ain’t got time to bleed”) and a good quota of dialogue against shit being blown up/spines being ripped out. Predator 2 and AVP were not so enjoyable so Predators had to up the quality and in doing so rescue the franchise and more importantly the predator itself from being a forgotten relic. Did it achieve its goal?

Eh…kind of.