 Welcome to today's edition of frightfully forgotten horror movies, but first what are we drinking? We're drinking Daniel O'Grady's four-leaf clover stout. Are we a leprechaun? I caught that! When he's all upside down and ripped up. Clover. From the Clover. Today we're gonna bring to you a French film. It is 2003's High Tension. It's like the first movie from the 2000s we've covered in a long time. Pretty much. This movie is written and directed by Alexandra Aja. It stars Cecil de France, along with, for some reason this person has one name, kind of like Prince, or rather Cher. And I don't even know how to pronounce it. Mai-win, Ma-win. Mai-win. Mai-win. Mai-win. Kai-win. And Felipe Nayan is in this. So the movie starts out with Marie and Alex, and they're driving to Alex's parents farm. We also see, while it turns dusk, there's this guy in this weird van. And he's like, he's all making all these weird grunting noises. Then you see the head drop out of the van, like it drops onto the ground. Pan down to the head, which the head looks actually pretty creepy. It takes the meaning of getting head to a different dimension here. We get to the house, we meet Alex's dad, and she's got herself a little brother too, his little bastard who's like dressed in like a cowboy outfit, running around. That we would these days. Yeah. Marie goes into a room to kind of get settled in, she lays on her bed, puts her headphones in, and she starts getting a little busy on herself, I guess you can say. There's a van that drives up, and you see the headlights kind of drive up, and you see this weird hand press the doorbell. The dad goes downstairs to answer it. It's just creepy because it's in the middle of nowhere. That's right. You hear like all these slashes and cutting sounds and everything. And the dad kind of goes up sort of halfway up the stairs, falls down, his head comes through to banisters, and this guy just rams this like credenza type thing right through his head, takes his head right off. For the first kill of the movie, you can't get any better than that. That fucking, that sets the tone for the rest of the movie going forward. So the mom wakes up, and she kind of comes downstairs too and sees what's going on. Marie, meanwhile, takes her headphones out and she starts to hear all this, and she hears the guy coming up the stairs. If this guy knows somebody's here, he'll look for me, so she tidies up the whole room and even the bathroom to make it look like nobody's been living there, and she hides under the bed. And he uncovers kind of half of the mattress and doesn't see anything, and he puts it back and he leaves. And lo and behold, Mary's underneath the bed, scared shitless. Marie gets out of her bedroom, she hears that guy coming, and she hides in the closet with all those slats where she can see out, but you can't necessarily see in. Right in front of the closet doors, the killer grabs a mother and just slits her throat, almost get the sense that she sees her in the closets, like looking into her eyes as she's dying, which is fucking terrifying. And it's tense because is she gonna say something? Help or something or whatever, run or whatever, and you don't know. And she goes to Alex, and Alex is all chained up on her bed. But the brother is still alive, and they actually see the brother run out of the house, little little bastard runs out of the house into the field, and then just hear the gunshots, just boom, boom, boom. Ah, that's looking Alex's eyes. Marie hides again, and the killer comes back into the house and takes Alex, puts her into his van. As he's coming around to the van to get in, Marie slips into the back of the van with Alex. Marie's telling her, oh, don't worry, we'll figure this out, we'll get out of this. He stops at a gas station to fill up. Marie slips out into the gas station and tries to kind of alert the attendant, but this boy and the killer has come back in to pay for the gas. Yeah, and the attendant guy doesn't really know what's going on. What do I do? I don't know. The killer asks for a nice bottle of scotch. Jimmy goes to go get the scotch, and takes an axe right to the gut. Fuck, Jack Torrance style. Yeah. It's just a sad waste of scotch, that's all. So Marie sees this and goes and hides in the bathroom. The killer does his due diligence, and scopes the whole place out, goes into the bathrooms with this fucking axe. Checks out the whole bathroom. But it's a big bathroom for a truck stop. That's true, yeah. It's huge. Oh, huge, like a sauna in there. And you think he's going to find her, but he doesn't. And he just takes a leak. And he just takes a leak and takes off. Marie runs to the phone and tries to calm the cops and gets a hole of them. It's like, okay, yeah, where are you? I don't know, I have no clue where I am. I was in a van, I don't know where I was. Well, yeah, but you have to tell us where you are if we're going to help you. I don't know. And she gets frustrated, just hangs up, takes Jimmy's keys and his car and a gun. And a gun. And hightails it after the killer. He turns off and, where is he? Oh, fuck, I lost him. And then right behind her, the headlights turn on and he starts ramming her. Yeah. And that's where we're going to end the plot. If you want to find out what happens at the end of High Tension, we'll keep watching the movie. One of the best things about this movie, which the title reveals, is the atmosphere and the high tension, right? The pacing of it all and everything. Oh, it's fucking great. Exactly. And the way it unwinds too is great because you get a little bit of character development. And then the killer comes and it just goes from like zero to a hundred. Like, whoa, man, this guy's wiping out the whole family. What is she going to do? Yeah. I like how it teases you too because they're driving down the highway, back roads, whatever. And you kind of, ah, this is going to be Texas Chainsaw massacre style. They're going to stumble upon a house they shouldn't or something's going to happen. But then they're like, oh, they just make it home. Well, what's going to happen now? They're home. Aren't they safe at home? No, they're not. Fucking guy comes to them. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's the idea of it, right? You're in an isolated farmhouse that's like miles away from civilization. So who's going to come and help you? Nobody. Exactly. Even if you call the cops, by the time it takes them to get to you, well, fuck, that's like half hour or something at least, you know? Yeah. I've always found that whole farmhouse out the country thing kind of scary. Yeah. Always as a kid to go to your grandparents place or cottage and you go to bed at night, like there's no one around, which is fine, but there's also no one around to help. Exactly. Right? Yeah. I think this movie is paced perfect where it's slower it needs to be. Right when you're kind of like, okay, yeah, things need to pick up a little bit. Yeah. It picks up right then, like, okay, the shit starts hitting the fan and then it slows down what it needs to. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it becomes slow and tense and then all of ramps up like it's perfect. Exactly. I think this movie is one of the most perfectly paced horror movies I've ever seen. Even as it gets slower, it's more tense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's slow but tense. Yeah. And so you're still, you're like, you're wondering what's going to happen. And it's a bit of a mystery too, right? It's like, who, what the fuck, who is this guy? What's he all about? The characters are great in this movie for the simple fact that there aren't many. We're left with the killer Marie and Alex basically throughout most of the whole movie. Not many movies can stand on only three characters. Most slashers, it's like one person gets killed, a little bit of a wait, next person gets killed, you wait a little bit more, next person. You're introduced to a lot of people, right? Yeah, in this one, everyone gets killed right off the bat and then it's just two people left. Yeah. The rest of the movie is just those two people trying to survive. I think the music and the sound design in this movie is great. It's almost lack there of music. There isn't much. It's all just weird sounds enough to unnerve you and make you kind of feel tense. Again, it's very Texas Chainsaw Mask or like with the weird kind of background noises and the atmospheric noises like the crickets. They're that pumping gas. Yeah, when you're pumping gas and it's like ah, like yeah, just remind you that time is ticking. Time's going by and we gotta fucking do something about this, right? Or like his boots squeaking and you just hear that. They use like every sense available to make you feel tension, to make you feel eye tension. That brings us to the kills, right? The kills in this movie are fucking great. Yes, the kills are great and they're fun and they're gory, but that's not what the movie is standing on. It's not what it's about. It's about everything else. There is that underlying story that you don't necessarily get right away. You don't even think about it. Yeah, you don't think about it, but it's there. And the movie stands more on that than anything. Which leads us to the twist. The twist in this movie is one of the great, I think, all-time horror movie twists that you don't really see coming. And it's cool for a newer movie too, right? Because you usually don't get this kind of dynamic and thought process in a newer film. Yeah, I remember when I first saw this movie, I was like really impressed. Ah, a new, well, at this time, you know, now the movie's getting, it's almost 20 years old. But at the time, I was like, ah, a newer horror movie and I fucking really dig it. The way this movie plays out, everything about it almost seems like a late 70s, early 80s kind of film, right? Something that should be out of 1981. Right, and you can see the influence there, right? You see the Texas chance of massacre influence with the whole back roads, farmhouse, and the way they use the lighting from the headlights. Look what your brother did to the door! You see a bit of Halloween influence in the closet. Yeah, through the slats and everything. Through the slats and everything. And like, he's like, oh yeah, I know those doors. I've seen those doors before. Yep, yep. So that's the cool thing about it is that not only does the movie stand on its own, but it does pay a little bit of homage to some earlier horror movies. It's a great, great horror movie that's kind of overlooked that thing. Yeah, and it'll leave you sitting on the edge of your seat. So check out High Tension, and until next time, keep drinking.