Directed by
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, Starring: Béatrice Dalle, Anne Marivin, Francis Renaud. Horror, France,
2014, 84mins, Cert 18.
Three young
teen boys truant from school on the last afternoon of term in order to avoid
detention. Whilst exploring an abandoned film studio on the outskirts of town,
they stumble upon a kidnapping and incur the wrath of the kidnapper who orders
his disfigured son to hunt them down.
Writer/director duo Bustillo and Maury’s Gallic homage to the slasher genre opens with a shockingly grim pre-credit segment featuring their talismanic actress Béatrice Dalle that inevitably recalls their 2007 debut INSIDE (À l'intérieur). Suffice to say before the opening title card flashes up there is bloodied trauma visited upon persons young, old, and unborn.
But then
there’s a wild tonal shift (the first of several) into almost STAND BY ME
territory as we’re introduced to the three teen scallywags who set off into the
countryside to explore the Blackwoods film studios (committing casual arson on
the way) and unwittingly stirring up a hornets’ nest of peril for themselves
and their respective family’s.
The uneven tone of the piece extends over into the onscreen depictions of violence. After the pre-credit explicitness, there’s a surprisingly occasional coyness to the signposted demises of several adult characters – but this is then contrasted with a protracted torturous death (I’ll just say plaster cast and leave it there) and a rousingly crowd-pleasing Grand Guignol showdown. Audience expectation is also often subverted when the obvious jump-scare pay-offs are denied, leaving the viewer dangling having been force-fed innumerable ‘stinger’ jolts ever since Brian De Palma had Carrie White’s hand grab Amy Irving out of her grave in CARRIE (1976).
The pleasure
of the film lies in mentally tick-boxing the numerous nods to the iconography
and tropes of the American slasher film filtered through the French sensibility
of Bustillo and Maury. The first image we see is of a jack-o-lantern followed
by a band of costumed trick-or-treaters lulling us into a familiar parade of
Halloween Americana. But this iconographic comfort blanket is soon pulled out
from under the viewer – and it’s clear we’re most certainly not in Kansas Toto.
Tobe Hooper seems to have been a significant influence – the abandoned subterranean living quarters festooned with fairy lights recalls THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2’s carnival lair, whilst the father/son manhunt dynamic (or in this case boy-hunt) is straight out of Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE. There’s also a full-blown bow to WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979), and iconography from MY BLOODY VALENTINE and THE PROWLER to name but a couple.
The
run-down decrepit film studio with its Wild West store fronts and underground
graveyard sets could be read as a metaphor for the filmmakers’ intention to tear
up the traditional tired genre conventions and deliver a fresh spin on well-worn
constructs. It’s an uneven but thoroughly entertaining ghost train ride which
occasionally veers off into some very dark corners before letting you return to
the relative safety of the daylight (just don’t look too closely over your
shoulder as you exit).
****(out of 5*)
Paul Worts
This review was originally published on the FrightFest website.
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