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There will be blood, lots of blood, in Frontiers, the latest gore-soaked horror to creep across the Channel. Brutalising his audience with fascist iconography and some nihilistic torture porn, French helmer Xavier Gens () turns in a solid piece of abattoir exploitation about a multi-racial gang of Parisian thieves (led by Karina Testa) who escape their riot-torn city and foolishly hole up in a hotel staffed by neo-Nazis. Armed with political bite and disturbing savagery it's a nasty, if cartoonish, take on France's reported racial meltdown

Like its peers in the French horror New Wave (Inside, , , ), Frontiers tries to put a new spin on old material. It opens with grainy footage of rioters attacking Parisian police after a right-wing candidate dominates in the polls, then homes in on Yasmine (Tasta) and her mates as they flee from a botched robbery. Hiding out in a family-run hotel cum slaughterhouse, the gang are menaced by nymphomaniacs, cannibals and the family patriarch, known only as Father (Jean-Pierre Jorris), who struts about in full Nazi regalia.

"A JOLTING, ADRENALINE-PUMPED SURVIVAL DASH"

So far, so much like a hellish marriage of and . Shot as a pulsing, jolting, adrenalin-pumped survival dash Frontiers checks off all the usual torture porn/backwoods horror clichés but tries hard for more. Invoking the real horror of the Holocaust - Yasmine is stripped, forcibly showered and has her head cropped; her buddy Farid (Chems Dahmani) is locked in a gas chamber-like refrigeration unit - Gens flirts with bad taste. His politics are sound, though: the jackbooted Father is more terrifying when jabbering about racial purity than snapping Achilles tendons with bolt cutters. Breaking out Sten guns, Bren guns and an antique Karabiner rifle for the unhinged finale, Gens loses his grip. Yet it's refreshing to see a horror movie that isn't afraid to remind us that the real monsters lie outside the auditorium.

Frontiers (Frontière[s]) is out in the UK on 14th March 2008.