the jaded viewer

The new French wave of horror is blazing across screens as the official trailer for Martys is now online.

If you've seen Inside or Frontiere(s) or even Haute Tension, you know the French may be squeamish when it comes to war but not in their horror movies. If the trailer and the 2 teaser trailers below are any indication of how sadistic and bloody this will be, I'm so fuckin thrilled.


The buzz is this is the uber ultimate in torture porn. Kudos to the fearless French horror film industry. Let the carnage ensue!!!!

Here's the synopsis (courtesy of esplatter.com):

France. A night at the beginning of the 1970s.

Lucie, a little girl missing for over a year, is discovered wandering by the side of a country road.

Near catatonic, she can say nothing about what has happened to her. The cops quickly find the place in which she's been incarcerated - a disused slaughterhouse. Every indication is that she never once left the empty, freezing room in which she was imprisoned.

Filthy, starving, dehydrated, the child's body nonetheless bears no traces of sexual abuse - this was no paedophile abduction, but something far stranger.

What happened in that icy room? And how did Lucie escape?

Lucie is hospitalized - slowly she learns how to live again, an enfant sauvage gradually returning to the real world. In the hospital, she meets Anna, another little girl, and a victim of terrible abuse at the hands of her family. In no time, they are inseparable. Anna takes charge of Lucie, like a mother. As for her kidnappers, the police are at a dead end. Lucie's ordeal remains a terrible mystery.

One night, as Anna sleeps, Lucie hears an awful, rasping breathing. A vision appears: a body, naked, skeletal, tortured. Barely human. The apparition seizes her...

15 years later. A house, isolated in the middle of a forest. A family: Mum, Dad, two kids. A happy home. As they eat breakfast, there's a knock at the door. The father opens it to find a young woman, hollow-eyed and wraithlike and mad. In her hands, a rifle. "Remember the little girl I once was?" She shoots him where he stands, enters the house, and locks the door...

Minutes later, the family lie bloody. All dead. Lucie calls Anna, who tells her not to move, she'll be right there. In shock, Lucie hangs up. And then she hears it. That terrible, terribly familiar breathing...

Oh man, this is going to kick so much freakin ass. Check out the official trailer and the teasers.

The Official Trailer


The Teaser Trailers

Frontiere(s) (2008)

Did all the Fulci disciple horror directors move to France?

It seems like it as the French delivered another splatter-ific, gore-hound's dream, nightmare-phobia world in Frontiere(s).

Just like Inside, this movie is filled with buckets of intense gore and bloodshed. And because of that, I'll forgive the mish mash of American horror genres they put into this mess.

Let me start off by saying, the world thinks America is filled with gun toting, inbred rednecks (with some pockets of KKK and Neo-Nazi-ish pieces of shit in there too).

Well I'm not going to say the US is a cookie cutter wonderland but Europe seems to be fucked up as well. That father from Austria comes to mind. And the French riots in 2005 shouldn't be overlooked as some major problems in France.

A couple of French hipsters take off to the French frontiere aka border after their Reservoir Dogs heist in riot prone Paris. Yasmine, our pregnant femme and her tough guy boyfriend try to meet up with the other heisters and end up a hostel/inn that has that oh so fucked up family that's worse than your own during Thanksgiving

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Haute Tension, The Descent, Hostel, Saw

OK. It's not very original. Sometimes I think the up and coming French horror directors watch our American horror crap and do the remake thing in reverse.

That's not too say this flick isn't good. It's premise is CTRL-C from our best horror movies as you can see above. But the conventions are copied to a tee.

-Teenagers resting in a seemingly eerie "hostel"

-Oversexed males egos are stroked with some French eye candy "pleasure" with the hot looking sisters

-The patriarch is always some old, white haired, insane brutal killer looking for an heir

-There's the good son who obeys orders

-There's the bad son who does the dirty work

-The Leatherface guy

-The young daughter who's totally bonkers

Yup. Same horror conventions that we've all seen before. But those can be forgiven when all other horror cylinders are working well.

The visuals are clever and scary. The barn interiors and butcher-ish morgue only add to the decadent setting.

The movie is frenetically paced with the scenes of carnage. Each chase is filled with mouting tensions between each slaughter. The ending is done with editing insanity as Ripley-like Yasmine escapes from her captors. Without these scenes of terror and unrelenting gore, Frontiere(s) would be yet another After Dark Horrorfest flick thrown into the used DVD bin.

That's the best part of it. The prudish Hollywood system would never create a movie like this with its over the top gore and savage beating of the heroine.

But it's French so that's just fine and dandy.

And it's dandy to see this all come out.

Knife trauma, Ankle trauma, Steam trauma, Shotgun trauma, Saw trauma, Butcher trauma, Scissor trauma, Neck trauma and more!

Frontiere(s) is currently out in limited theatrical release and it comes out on DVD on 5/13. French horror has always been cutting edge and they go to the cliff on this one. Frontiere(s) splatter and extreme scenes of carnage makes it's American counterparts look Disney-ish in comparison.

I'm not going to say this made me all giddy like Inside did. But at leastthe gorehound in me was entertained from start to finish.

Rating:
The Trailer