It’s Toronto International Film Festival time again. And while all the stuffy celebrities and wannabes are walking red carpets with paparazzi everywhere, the real fun is being had at the Ryerson Theatre beginning every night around 11:59. That’s right -MIDNIGHT MADNESS. A celebration of murder, madness and mayhem and the fans who live for it. There are still tickets available for some of the midnight movies and it is definitely worth the trip to Toronto to experience these movies with such an enthusiastic audience. Enough about that. This is a movie review after all!

Frontiere(s) is a French slash fest about a group of thieves who flee the city with a stack of stolen money following the election of an extreme right wing government. They get separated into two groups following the shooting of one of their friends, and agree to meet up at a hotel in the country. Two of the friends find a family-run hotel in the middle of nowhere that makes the Bates Motel look like the Four Seasons. Things seem to be going well for the two thieves as they get acquainted with two of the family’s sisters. Unfortunately for them, the family is a clan of cannibalistic Nazis – that’s right – cannibal Nazis – who run the hotel as a front for preying on unsuspecting tourists. The two men are savagely attacked and try to escape into an abandoned mine, only to find there is something down inside the mine that does not quite appear human. Their two friends arrive and quickly fall prey to the family as well. Sprinkle in some meat hooks, table saws, leaking trachea tubes and a room full of pigs, and you have a splat-tacular grue fest that gets so bloody you’ll wish you were wearing a rain coat!

First things first. There is NOTHING original about this movie. The premise is “Psycho” meets “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. It’s the typical story group of people who take the “Wrong Turn” and end up fodder for a bunch of psychopaths. Then again, there are a lot of people who love these kind of movies and don’t care if the premise is not all that original. Besides – wouldn’t you rather watch something that is SIMILAR to movies you love as opposed to another REMAKE????

The acting in this movie is very solid, and lead Karina Testa stands out not only for her acting but also for her ability to withstand being covered in blood and/or manure for large segments of the film.

Director Xavier Gens does a good job, though there are a number of sequences with “shaky cam” quick edits which I find are over-used and seldom effective in movies today. Fortunately he manages to steady the camera for most of the film. The film also drags a bit in the third act, though it is a bit of a rest from the all-out assault that follows. Gens is building a name very quickly in the movie world – his next film is “Hitman” which should bring him some notoriety outside of his native France.

The movie is not “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, but it is certainly bloodier, and more entertaining than going to see some Hollywood remake.