High Tension

Two French college students (Maïwenn Le Besco, Cécile De France) try to escape from a psychotic serial killer who invades the family summer home of one of them, hacking the rest of the family to pieces before tossing one of the girls in the back of his filthy van and driving off into the night. Originally released in the United States in 2005 (and sometimes known as Switchblade Romance), this was writer-director Alexandre Aja’s bid to break the American monopoly on repulsive, pointless slasher porn. Aja makes Rob Zombie look like François Truffaut, and with this film he forfeits forever, on behalf of France, any right to lecture on the superiority of French culture. The Sacramento French Film Festival will be showing the unrated version, before Aja’s more appalling excesses were trimmed to get an American “R” rating.