HORROR STRIPPED TO THE BONE

REVIEWED - SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE (HAUTE TENSION): This rather extraordinary film begins with two pretty French girls, Alexia and Marie, driving through the night towards an isolated farmhouse. An ominous atmosphere hangs over events, and viewers may anticipate the sort of slow-burning, brooding tension found in the classic suspense pictures of Claude Chabrol and Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Not quite. Within 10 minutes we are made aware - the action is off-camera, thank goodness - that a fat man is using a decapitated head to do something truly obscene to himself, about which, after reminding you that this sentence contains the word head, we should say no more.

Unlikely as it may seem, worse is to follow. The swarthy nutter, played by Philippe Nahon, who was similarly frightful as the butcher in Gasper Noé's Seul Contre Tous, bursts into the farmhouse at night and chops up everyone bar Alexia, who he ties up and dumps in the back of his van, and Marie, who manages to flee the building.

If you thought blood could flow no more heavily than it did in Kill Bill, then you'll be in for a shock. With the assistance of Gianetto De Rossi, the special effects maestro behind such grisly gems as Zombie Flesh-Eaters, young director Alexander Aja carves up bodies and casts viscera about with an enthusiasm not witnessed since the nihilistic horror film's golden (or should that be scarlet) era in the 1970s.

Aja makes specific references to such pictures as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Last House on the Left, but the tone is so relentlessly bleak and the atmosphere so fetid that nobody could reasonably accuse the film of indulging in jokey post-modernity.

Featuring a gasping, fraught performance as Marie by Cecile de France (the only bearable thing in the recent Around the World in 80 Days), Switchblade Romance manages to excel in both its tense, shadowy pursuit sequences and its outrageously explicit exercises in butchery. Were it not for the hackneyed final twist - this is, by my reckoning, the third time it has been used in a movie this year - this would qualify as an unalloyed classic of its genre.

Readers allergic to subtitles should be aware that the characters say almost nothing throughout the film. They do, however, scream, gurgle, weep and make frequent, desperate pleading noises.