Before I begin this review, I just want to say one thing:

Fuck Alexandre Aja.

You burst onto the scene High Tension and became a fucking star (however undeserved it might have been), yet you wasted a wealth of potential on shitty remakes. I have yet to see a bigger fall from grace since Lucifer got a little haughty and ended up relocating to the deep South. High Tension is dark, gritty, violent and, above all, fucking INTENSE throughout, comparable to other survival horror films that don’t suck, such as Ils. This vitriol (I LOVE that word) technically has nothing to do with High Tension and everything to do with the fact that Alexandre Aja has always been a hack, and I just needed a clever and incredibly angry way to introduce the fact that this film, despite being dark, gritty, violent, and fucking INTENSE, really, really sucks.

Aja’s problem with this film – and subsequent films – is not his direction, obviously, but his complete and utter inability to write a story that either A) makes anything that resembles sense in every sense of the word, and B) doesn’t appeal to those who possess an extra chromosome. Once Hollywood scooped him up and beat all the talent out of him, we’re treated to dreck like the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Mirrors, which simply proves that he’s an unoriginal sad sack. Following High Tension his next foray into originality was P2, which I just won’t dignify with anything resembling more than a sudden and extra mucous-y gagging sound.

But I digress. This is a review of a single film and not the long and disappointing career of a French import. So let’s begin with the plot.

Marie and Alex, best friends in a friendship loaded with sexual tension, are on trip to Alex’s parents house for a relaxing vacation filled with sun, fun, and…….MAYHEM!!!!!!!!

Kidding. But upon arrival, after the lights go out and Marie has gone downtown on herself, the man responsible for elevating the tension arrives and decides to go all crazy insane-o for absolutely no reason whatsoever – or so we’re lead to believe. After dispatching Alex’s mother, father, and younger brother, he kidnaps Alex and drives off. Unbeknownst to him, Marie has stowed away with Alex and a knife.

They arrive at a gas station, where instead of killing the tension elevating French guy with the sharp knife she has (she gives it to Alex instead), she follows him into the gas station and witnesses the brutal murder of the clerk, who was only three days away from retirement. The killer leaves, she calls the cops and screams at them in French, which was hot as shit, and follows him in the dead clerk’s car. What follows is an incredible appearance of the song New Born by Muse, the death of the killer, and the twist.

The twist. That fucking twist.

Cited as the most detrimental aspect of the film and scientific proof of Aja’s hackitude, the twist takes everything that makes the film worth watching and throws it in the viewer’s face as if to say “Sucka!” Are you ready for it? Are you? Here it is…

….

Marie and the killer are the same person.

It was at this point in the film that I felt Aja personally leaped through the screen, slapped me in the face, punched my dog, and knocked up my girlfriend. How could a movie, a movie that was essentially perfect in its approach and a wonderful breath of fresh air to the slasher genre, turn into the cinematic equivalent of a kick in the nuts? I nearly walked out of the theater, because coupled with the fact that it was dubbed, this gross abuse of my intelligence was simply unforgivable.

Have you ever seen The Village? Wonderful movie…until the twist. Both of them. Just like The Village, High Tension possessed a perfectly straightforward premise that possessed an incomprehensibly bad twist in an effort to make it unique. This, I think, is a bigger problem than most people realize.

A twist can make or break a film, a predisposition for the latter occurring being one of the more dominant aspects of horror films. Constructing a twist that isn’t immediately figured out (like in High Tension), or doesn’t make the preceding hour and a half nonsensical in every single aspect (like in High Tension) is a difficult task, so when you have to resort to the most used and abused plot device in horror history to make a perfectly good slasher flick be relevant, you’re clearly doing something wrong.

I’d like to see Aja and J. S. Cardone team up and do a horror film. The ensuing abortion would create a vacuum of suck and destroy us all.

I have not seen the first three films by Alexandre Aja, though I suspect most have not. His magnum opus might be considered Haute Tension had the script not degraded into a cheap M. Night Shayamalan rip-off, rendering the first half of the movie completely implausible and utterly stupid. Though this made the film absolutely unbearable, it was not without its upsides. The soundtrack, cinematography, and methods of dispatch, if you will, were absolutely brilliant, so I don’t think I’d be completely off base in saying that this was just a fluke and hoped for good things to come from him in the future.

His next film was a remake of the Craven borefest The Hills Have Eyes, which was overtly graphic for the sake of being graphic while being just as boring as the original. This says nothing of its originality, of which there is almost none, falling into an inescapable vortex of cheap horror cliches. The final twenty minutes are ridiculously predictable, and I left the theater wondering what the fuck I just watched.

His next film as a writer was P2, which I never saw. This is a good thing, as it doesn’t seem to be anything more than your run-of-the-mill Hollywood suspense-thriller. After that comes this year’s South Korean remake, Mirrors, doomed to fail because it’s a remake of an Asian horror film. Just because The Ring was successful does not give every fucking big-name horror director carte blanche to adapt every Asian horror film into a shitty one-off American adaptation. The Grudge sucked, Dark Water sucked,and Pulse definitely sucked, so what makes you think this won’t suck? ‘Cause Jack Bauer is in it?

Alexandre Aja is lucky in that he made one successful horror film (albeit a shitty successful horror film). Instead, however, of making more successful horror films that are actually good, he’s selling out by making cheap remakes of classics that also suck, remakes of Asian horror films that are rarely good, and really, really, really, really, really, really shitty retarded suspense-thrillers. His next movie is Piranha 3-D. Here’s hoping it’s a comedy.

Mr. Aja, please stop making shitty horror films. The French are dominating the genre, and you’re sticking out like a black man at a Klan rally. Have some God damned dignity and make something truly inspiring to horror fans everywhere. You’ve exhibited a slow and steady decline, so…well, so I guess you’re like most horror directors. Heh. No one can ever top their first.

Fun note: Aja holds membership in the Splat Pack, “a collection of filmmakers who, since 2002, have brought about a renaissance of horror film.” Of those on the list, the only who is worth a damn is Neil Marshall, ’cause, well, Dog Soldiers and The Descent fucking ruled.