Two friends visit the parents of one of them who lives on a farm. In the middle of the night, a murderous, nasty man appears outside the house. He kills the entire family except for the oldest daughter, which he kidnaps. What the killer doesn’t know is that her best friend is always around, and she does everything she can to free her friend.
Switchblade Romance, also known as Haute Tension and High Tension, was director Alexandre Aja’s big breakthrough. You could say that he was the one who started the French new wave of horror movies. After Switchblade Romance came movies like Inside and Martyrs, so this was a good time for French horror movies.
I watched Switchblade Romance the year it came out, and I loved it. Now it has been many years since I last watched it, but I remembered the most important scenes, which I felt was a big minus.
The movie is still good, but it hasn’t quite withstood the test of time. I feel it is a movie you should only see once. The movie has a huge twist, and that surprise destroys a lot of the experience when you know about it and have watched the movie before.
Switchblade Romance has several graphic scenes. The first kill we see took me out of the movie when a person gets his head cut off when the killer uses a bookcase to cut his head off. Yes, a bookcase! It looks so stupid because what follows is a cruel scene when the killer slits the throat of a person. I still remember that scene after so many years. And when we see the damage to the throat a few minutes later, I had to check my throat and see if everything was okay. It’s so nasty and graphic. The killer also returns, because he’s not done with this person yet. So this is a scene that still haunts me to this day.
The killer, who probably likes to have fun with pigs, isn’t a scary man. He looks like a sweaty, ugly farmer who likes to make a love child with a pig. So I don’t want to say that he’s a threatening character. He’s just annoying, and he looks like a big loser!
The runtime is around 90 minutes. If there’s one thing I feel Alexandre Aja misses, it’s creating an intense and frightening atmosphere. When the hero is hiding from the killer, I never felt my heart rate increase. I didn’t care if she and her friend would survive, because we never get to know the characters. I hate to follow characters that never have invited me in. Who are they?
The movie looks visually good, it’s well-acted, and the soundtrack is superb. It feels like a soundtrack that Quentin Tarantino could have put together. And most of the kills are brutal and graphic, as slasher fans appreciate. But the excitement, which is also important, it’s absent when I never care about the characters, and I don’t find the killer frightening. Inside (2007) is the opposite. That movie makes me happy every time I watch it.