Frontier(s)

Saw Frontier(s), a French horror. I don't know if I'd count it as "extreme horror" like I usually do with French horrors. This one follows a trio of young men with a girlfriend in tow who go to a hotel only to discover (surprise!) that the hotel is run by French back-woods actual-literal-Nazis. It was clearly mostly inspired by Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's a hand-tipping dinner scene which is very nearly a shot-for-shot remake of the famous Texas Chainsaw dinner scene. There's echos of some strange things going on however.

First of all, the film starts by telling us that the girlfriend is pregnant. At one point two of the guys crash their car and maybe it was just me, but the view of the car out of the mouth of a cave reminded me of a sonogram. Immediately after that, they crawl through a small, dark tunnel while crying for their mama. I think something's going on. But then again one of them is met out the other side with knives and the other back-tracks feverishly which is a bit confusing and anyway what's the symbolism here? Horror = blood = birth, like in Inside? I don't buy it, but the argument could be made.

Anyway, much more obviously is the racism angle. Let me preface this by saying that I know nothing about French politics. It's a touchy subject and one that, even for an American, I'm profoundly ignorant about. That said, the protagonists seem to be muslim (one of them explicitly says he is) and they're apparently fleeing from the Paris riots where we first see them, shooting at cops. They escape only to run into murderous, inbred, literal Nazis who rave about racial purity. I believe this is one of those sympathy-swaps that horrors like to do. We are supposed to identify the protagonists as definitely evil people only to have the table turned and be made to sympathize with them. It is symbolically revealed that it is we, with our prejudices, who are the real monsters.

Puzzle solved! So that's definitely going on I think (although, keep in mind: profound ignorance.) Apart from that, the film is kind of a romp. The hillbilly Nazis have a giant, sprawling complex, full of farm equipment and guns. The whole thing is kind of a rollercoaster. There are no jumps, more repulsive gore, horrible deaths, and deformed freaks. There's a creepy sensuality to the men and women of the compound which is entrancing and off-putting. At one point one of the women clutches the girlfriend like a lost child. She grabs her stomach and joyously chirps "you're pregnant!" By this point we know that this is not good news, rendering her merriment ghastly and chilly. There's also a death by tablesaw. Fun stuff! The politics may turn you away, but it's not a bad splatter flick after all.