Frontier

Frontier (2007): Wow, the Tapehead is really going to have to change his tune about French movies if they continue to make flicks like Frontier. Now before you run off to the video store, be forewarned this is a first class effort in terror and organ carving gore. If that isn’t your cup of ‘swill’, pass on this one. The story goes something like this: a group of French Moslem young people are enmeshed in a general riot while robbing a bank. One of them gets badly shot (which starts the bloodletting early) and has to be left behind. They split up and head for the country, planning to meet up at a hostel near the border with Holland but things don’t go quite as planned. They should know by now that you never ever go to a hostel in rural France and not surprisingly, spiff soon starts to happen. It turns out the inn is run by (stay with me on this now) a family of in-bred, cannibalistic, hard core Nazis led by a grandfather who looks remarkably like B-movie maven Roger Corman with a bad attitude and a nasty sneer. This segment of the master race appears to prefer living in a dirty run down abandoned mining installation. They also seem to have become somewhat mentally challenged by eating too much of ‘the other white meat’. We also meet a kidnapped mentally challenged pregnant woman who seems capable of giving birth to really defective kids who are consigned to crawling around in the mine and grabbing scraps off the things hanging in the larder (ugh). No matter, the master race continues to try and get her to come up with a pure Aryan storm trooper but they finally seem to get the idea that the new gal from our doomed group may have better genes. Cast mortality is appallingly high and most types of cutting devices imaginable are used by the movie’s end along with automatic weapons, shotguns and pistols. Throw in some tendon cutting, exploding heads, and a little propane explosion and you have the makings of a first class gore fest. The movie ends somewhat like the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in that the lead ingénue stumbles out of the Nazi trauma center with a mind suitable for further institutionalizing. This plot has been done before (see Hostel) but this one is done well and by the end of the movie, you will be exhausted but probably unable to sleep. The movie is rated R for: hot Nazi lassies, nasty Nazi lads, geriatric sneering Nazis, exploding Nazis, wounded Nazis, dead Nazis, inappropriate use of a table saw, a salted and boxed Moslem, multiple dead people just hanging around, excessive pig generated mud, and especially for the cringe inducing tendon cutting scene.