lowquality.net

Direc­tor: Pas­cal Laugier

Coun­try of Ori­gin: France

Rat­ings:

Justin: 3 1/2 Stars

Review: As far as French Hor­ror films go, Mar­tyrs is more French than it is Hor­ror. By that, I sim­ply mean that it lacks the heart pal­pi­tat­ing excite­ment of other new films in the genre (please see Haute Ten­sion, Inside, Ils and Fron­tiers) and misses its mark by try­ing to do too much. Nev­er­the­less, it con­tains two very impor­tant ele­ments to all great French Hor­ror films: hot-as-fuck French girls being crazy as hell and a lot of gra­tu­itous “why-would-you-do-that?” vio­lence. Despite hav­ing some great moments, Mar­tyrs just doesn’t seem to be quite pos­i­tive what kind of movie it wants to be. I would have been con­tent to see Lucie killing more inno­cents in hopes of silenc­ing her psy­chic tor­men­tor and to see Anna slowly dis­cov­er­ing that Lucie was com­pletely unjus­ti­fied in her killings, insert a few more scenes where inno­cent upper-class French house­holds go down in a blaze of shot­gun fire. Would have been great. Instead, what begins as a sim­ple premise for a solid psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror film takes a turn towards sicko BDSM film and it just becomes a bum­mer to watch some poor girl beaten sense­less and sur­gi­cally muti­lated by some fucked-up, high-society cult try­ing to find proof of life after death.

Yeah I just gave away the ending.

You know, maybe I’m just a fat jerk-off Amer­i­can, but I just hate it when peo­ple make hor­ror movies where the wrong peo­ple get killed. That’s why I still think Amer­i­can Psy­cho sucks. Patrick Bate­man was an ass­hole. I don’t iden­tify with him because he’s a self-absorbed yup­pie, I don’t care if he throws a chain­saw at a hooker (..ok that was sweet). But, I digress. I real­ize I’m prob­a­bly miss­ing the point of Mar­tyrs (and Amer­i­can Psy­cho for that mat­ter) but if there some deep philo­soph­i­cal mean­ing to this film it is over­shad­owed by the amount of effort put into depict­ing the abuse of young girls by a gang of old money brutes– not to men­tion that these philo­soph­i­cal ele­ments don’t come in play until 1/2 way into the fea­ture. If the hor­ror ele­ments were really the focus of the film then they were diluted by the film­mak­ers attempt at mak­ing some deep philo­soph­i­cal statement.

Nev­er­the­less, style points for the most real­is­tic depic­tion of a flayed human being I’ve seen since Hell­raiser.