High Tension

I have spent the past thirty or forty years desensitizing myself to horror movies. I've seen gore, splatter, slasher, you name it, I've seen it! So, when I come across a horror movie that can actually surprise me with a twist, it's really done something! And that actually happened with High Tension!

High Tension seems on the surface to be your basic girls fight a psychotic killer movie, but there's a bit more to this movie than that. I'd love to tell you about the ending of this, but I wouldn't want to ruin it for you. Suffice it to say that this is one of the best written movies I've seen in a long time.

On the surface this is your typical slasher fare. A young family, living in the backwoods of France (who knew France had a backwoods?!?), when late one night a truck pulls up, a large man rings the bell and when the father answers the door, he is promptly killed. The psycho then goes through the house and kills the wife, hunts down a small boy and takes as a hostage the college age daughter. The one thing he doesn't notice is that the daughter brought home a friend who's been hiding from him. Well, I'm not going to get too specific here, but let's say that this turns into as tight a thriller as The Hitcher.

High Tension is probably the only French Film that you'll ever hear me talk about, so I can now claim myself to be one of those foreign film snobs! 'Yes, I enjoy French film. You don't??' It's High Tension and if you see the twist ending coming, then you're a better man than I, and that's why I give it my highest rating of four burning cigars! So, until next time when I'll reveal that my mother's been in the basement for the past twenty years and I've been dressing as her during the day...Oh, wait...My mother's not dead, why am I dressing like her again??? Well, just remember, the best movies are bad movies!