Tuesday, May 01, 2007

New French horror, L'INTERIEUR (INSIDE)!

From AICN, "The new wave of horror has to happen somewhere soon. Asian horror is dead. American horror is in trouble. Imitations and remakes with occasional spikes of originality. Somebody’s got to be making real, ballsy, original horror somewhere... don’t they?
Longtime spy Champagne2000 returns today with a look at a film he seems to think is a step in the right direction:

'First movie from the pair Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, Inside tells the story of Sarah, a pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis, a newcomer who's doing a good job here) alone in her house on Christmas Eve, waiting to go the hospital on the next day to give birth. Then someone knocks on the front door. Who is it? A mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle, very good... as usual) who wants to take her baby from her... and when I say « take » I mean open her belly with a butcher knife or scissors.'

Inside is a balls to the wall slasher movie. It's short and fast. In a way, it goes against the rules of this kind of movie, the heroine doesn't spend the whole movie wondering where the killer is. No I-open-the-door and-a-black-cat-coming-from-nowhere falls-on-me-with-scary-sounds here. In the last part, the movie turns into a survival when the heroine uses stuff from the house to fight back, Predator in the kitchen-style !Inside follows the path some movies took recently like Saw or Hostel, those movies who seems to have no limits about what can be shown on a screen. With two scenes, Inside goes very far, the way Hostel did or the way Italians did in the glorious 80's with movies like Anthropophagus. Watching the movie, you understand people behind the movie are real fans of the genre (one of the two director is a former movie critic from Mad Movies - kind of French Fangoria), it's not made by a an opportunist music video director looking to get its ticket to Hollywood. Inside, it's « take it or leave it », a kind of punk attitude that is, unfortunatelly, more and more to hard to find in recent slasher movie. So, as we say in France: Merci beaucoup!"

2 comments:

Octopunk said...

After the stuff Alexandre Aja's done (High Tension, the new Hills Have Eyes), I'll buy France as the new vanguard of horror.

I know that sounds strange, but American horror, with a few exceptions, just keeps making the same mistakes.

Anonymous said...

Ahhh I will agree! What the hell is going on with the American horror films? **shakes head and grabs bottle**

Malevolent

 2018  ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...