High Tension (2003)
Directed by Alexandre Aja
Best friends Marie and Alexia decide to spend a quiet weekend at Alexia's parents' secluded farmhouse. But on the night of their arrival, the girls' idyllic getaway turns into an endless night of horror.
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What critics compared High Tension to
Aja has professed an admiration for genre classics like The Evil Dead and Halloween, and at least until the killing starts, he threatens to match them, creating an almost unbearably intense air of peril.
Oozing into a theater near you soon will be remakes of "The Evil Dead," "The Wicker Man" and Wes Craven's "Hills Have Eyes," an atrocity exhibition (family + cannibals = trouble) that is being directed by the 26-year-old French filmmaker Alexandre Aja.
While Haute Tension (that’s High Tension to us American folks) starts out with the feel of The Evil Dead or Cabin Fever, it never quite makes it to anything enjoyable.
Não há sangue escorrendo durante toda a projeção, como por exemplo em "The Evil Dead" ou "Fome Animal", mas nos momentos onde ocorrem as mortes, o roteiro faz questão de evidenciar a violência e a terrível dor das vítimas.
True enough, this remake is less repellent and more coherent than Aja's previous film, High Tension (or, to give it its full measure of Gallic goredom, Haute Tension).
Unlike other modern filmmakers trying to exploit remakes of bygone horror flicks, French director Alexandre Aja ("High Tension") understands that this type of movie is far more intense if it doesn't look like an MTV video.
As some faithful readers may recall, director Alexandre Aja’s big studio feature film debut, 2003’s High Tension, had me bug-eyed for several days after the screening.
This new Hills Have Eyes has been scrupulously copied from Craven's original template by hotshot French horror director Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, released in the U.S. as High Tension).
Director Alexandre Aja demonstrated some talent for horror filmmaking with HIGH TENSION, although it was ultimately ruined by an atrocious English-language dub and a ridiculous twist that took screenwriting cheating to another level.
The French writer-director Alexandre Aja ("High Tension") and co-writer Grégory Levasseur keep the shocking narrative similar to the original which was meant to be scary stuff, but it's now supported with a big budget and manages to get the monsters better makeup (the original makeup was cheesy and more laughable than scary) and improve on the special effects while making the narrative more topical, political and graphic.
As is, Men has that nonsensical storytelling Alexandre Aja’s High Tension has; the ending as well as many things leading up to it is illogically baffling.
The deaths are rather extreme for what an American viewer sees in a theater, but doesn’t compare to something like Dead Alive or The Story of Ricky .
Rivaling the gore levels found in Dead Alive and Evil Dead , High Tension , however, comes nowhere near being as inventive as those films in terms of plot, style, or humor.
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That hokey Kiefer Sutherland time-waster made me question the abilities of director Alexandre Aja, even though he’d blown me away with the French shocker High Tension and his manic remake of The Hills Have Eyes .
Of course, if you put it up against Open Water (2003), Cabin Fever (2002), High Tension (2003) and Wolf Creek (2005) this becomes a work of pure genius.
From Psycho to Dressed to Kill to High Tension, the disorder has been used as a twist, a plot device, or simply as an opportunity to showcase the talents of a film’s lead actor.
Those nasty bits are few and far between, and, infamy aside, nowhere as gruesome as other extreme Euro horrors like “Inside” or “High Tension.”
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Equal parts "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "High Tension," this elegant and surprisingly fast-paced blend of horror and suspense overcomes some of its more ridiculous ingredients thanks to endless invention.
Apart from a handful of ultra-violent slasher movies (such as “High Tension” and “Them”), contemporary French cinema seldom ventures into the realm of horror.