Haute Tension is one of the most unnerving movies to come down the pike recently, and this is coming from a connoisseur of unnerving movies. In particular, the first forty five minutes live up to the film’s title by being almost unbelievably tense; the story begins with two college girls visiting one of their parents’ houses in the country on holiday. During the night everything goes gruesomely wrong when a hulking killer perpetrates a murderous home invasion. When one of the girls is taken captive, the other goes in pursuit, deftly moving the film from the genre of rural terror to the urban nightmare. (The homage to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a particularly nice touch.) I have a feeling that many will balk at the film’s ending, but in my opinion this is a near-perfect update on the classic grindhouse shocker. This film will be released shortly in the US under the title High Tension, and while a bit of censorship is inevitable, it will probably still be worth the trip to the theatre. Of course, if you have a region-free player, there’s only one way to see this: uncut.

There are no comments yet. You could be the first!