Monday, February 14, 2011

Frontier(s) (2007)

This is a movie about Nazis. 
Judging from the Netflix blurb and the cover art and stuff, I assumed this was going to be a movie about trying to keep your unborn child alive during a revolution against a brutal authoritarian regime a la Children of Men. It's not;  It's about Nazis. 
The premise of the film is so promising. An ultra-conservative and white supremacist regime is elected in France. This sparks hugely violent riots across Paris. A bunch of kids steal a ton of money and try to make it to Luxembourg. One of these kids is three-months pregnant. So far, this film conceptually rules. 
But then, they leave Paris. They just make it out of Paris fine and escape to a motel run by literal cannibal Nazis who decide that the pregnant woman is carrying the savior of the Aryan race which leads to a the Hills Have Eyes-esque escape. 
Now the resulting film isn't bad, in fact it's great. Frontier(s) manages to be the perfect blend of The Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's got character development rarely seen in a film like this and literally every character is at least interesting and not just "cannon fodder" like so many supporting roles in horror films. It is a superb film in every right and I want to make that clear.
However, come on, you're seriously going to take the revolution premise and use it as an establishing shot and a little bit of allegory during the plot of the film? The only points where the fact that an insane authoritarian regime was just elected into power are brought up after they leave Paris are when two of our leading men are watching TV and make a George Bush joke, when the Nazi patriarch implies that the extreme conservative party is made of literal cannibal Nazis, and at the extreme end when the protagonist is forced to surrender to them.
I want a political horror movie that isn't Red State.

Friday, February 11, 2011

The Human Centipede: First Sequence (2009)

This movie sure exists. I don't really know how address The Human Centipede. I guess it superficially fits the mold of the best horror films, and falls in line with body horror classics but it doesn't really do anything with it. It sets itself up almost like a post-9/11 Videodrome in a way and if you wanted to stretch the film to the point of breaking it could sort of make a salient point about media consumption but I don't want to stretch the film. I don't want to force irony into where it clearly does not belong. To be honest, I'm not sure Tom Six is physically capable of making a salient point about media consumption. I'm not sure Tom Six understands why Croenenberg is a genius or why body horror is an effective genre. I'm not sure Tom Six is actually a director, let alone a human being, and not some kind of physical manifestation of misogyny and xenophobia. In fact, I'm sure that Tom Six, if he does truly exist, just got kinda high and said "Wouldn't it be hilarious if you like shat into a chicks mouth? Oh, and she is sewn to your butt so she can't complain. We could make it a horror movie. I watched Scream, I can do that."