Parlez-you English, Mademoiselle?

Tonight, I saw this French horror film that's had a bit of buzz about it, High Tension. I have some very mixed feelings about it. For the capsule review, I'd have to give it a C+. But there's a little more to it than that.

First of all, the way Lion's Gate chose to bring the film to the States is very questionable in my mind. They were faced with a real problem, that subtitled films rarely show outside of "art house" theaters. And a gory slasher film is not the sort of thing one goes to the "art house" for. Nor is it likely slasher film fans would travel there to see the movie.

On the flip side, they apparently felt that dubbing the film into English wasn't a great solution either. There's very, very little dialogue in the movie, so it's not like the audience would easily acclimate to watching people's mouths move differently from the words you're hearing -- the assumption made was that every new time you saw it, it would be jarring since you hadn't seen it for the last 10 or 15 minutes or so.

Unfortunately, the decision they made was to do both. Some of the dialogue is dubbed into English, and some of it is left in French and subtitled. I found this even more distracting. If you stretch a bit, you can make the assumption that, since several of the characters are American, they are in fact speaking English at times, and French the rest of the time. Still, this theory didn't make it any less distracting for me at the time. Plus, I did some net research and learned that originally the entire film was in French, which to me just blows the integrity of the hybrid translation notion anyway.

I'm trying hard to set that all aside though, and just remark on the film itself. It's a slasher very much along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film doesn't even have the minimal plot that Halloween had -- this is just the story of shit happening to poor people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The violence is very unsettling and well-depicted. The movie was pulling me along very well for more than an hour.

But then, things took a left turn. It would appear the film tried near the end to become something else. And to me, the sudden alteration didn't work at all, and made the whole suffer. It's hard for me to get much into the specifics of what went wrong and why without perhaps taking some enjoyment away from anyone who would want to see the movie. Suffice it to say, after paying homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for most of the movie, the influence of a few specific other films popped up, and the hybrid was no more successful than the hybrid of dubbing and subtitles.

One of my friends who went with me also informed me that the plot was very similar to the Dean Koontz novel Intensity. I know I said the movie didn't have much of a plot, but apparently what was there was ripped almost entirely from Intensity. From my friend's description of the book, I'd be contemplating a copyright infringement suit if I were Dean Koontz. And a quick Google search showed me that several reviewers have noted the similarity.

Yet all this, and I still rate it as high as C+? Well, I guess I'm saying that despite the language problem, the movie really engaged me and entertained me for a while. That was until the abrupt shift near the end, and before I learned of the apparent plagiarism going on. I think the movie was rating a B+ until then.

In any case, the movie did have us talking at length after we left the theater, which is more than most summer movies manage.