Haute Tension (2003) | 31 Days of Gore

Alex is spending a weekend at her parents’ house, secluded in the French countryside. Tagging along is Alex’s best friend Marie, a closeted lesbian who’s secretly in love with Alex. While the two sleep in separate rooms, a man drives his delivery truck right up to the front step, rings the doorbell, and brutally murders Alex’s father. As the stranger attacks the rest of the family, Marie scurries about the house, slipping from one shadow to the next, searching for a phone or weapon.

The killer chains Alex up in the back of his truck and flees. Marie chases after them. This launches a cat and mouse game in which the killer is always one step ahead of Marie in exceedingly unlikely ways—not because he’s clever, but because he has to be or the movie would be over too soon. And that’s the entire movie: a monotonous game of hide and seek, padding out the runtime until it attempts one of the dumbest twist endings in movie history.

You know what? I’m being too kind to this movie. Twist endings that come this far out of left field are a cheat. It’s the second time this month that I’m calling Shenanigans, which I don’t do lightly. Flag on the field, insert-your-own-sport-cliche here, and fuck this crap for wasting nearly two hours of my time. The idiotic twist wouldn’t just fall apart on a second viewing, it does not compute on the first viewing. This is like playing a game of Imagination with the neighborhood kid who, upon losing fair and square, proclaims, “Nuh-uh! I was wearing an invisible force field! I put it on before you shot me!”

It’s unusual for me to hate a movie that looks this good… hell, look back at some of the other movies I recommended this month and you’ll agree it’s unusual for me to hate any movie. The acting isn’t the problem. The killer would have been the stuff of nightmares in a better movie. The ingredients are all here, but they over-measured the flour or under-baked the cake or… I’m running out of metaphors because I am dumber after seeing this.

I’ve seen the film revered as a gore masterpiece in some circles, but even that aspect left me scratching my head at times. When your movie takes itself as seriously as this one does, the killer shouldn’t be able to shove a piece of furniture into someone’s head and pop it clean off at the neck. This is a widespread problem among horror filmmakers: they need to learn just how resilient the human body is. Besides, it’s more effective when your killer has to work at dismembering his victims.