12 December 2006 | Coventry

7 | Maléfique...c'est chique!

Good horror movies from France are quite rare, and it's fairly easy to see why! Whenever a talented young filmmaker releases a staggering new film, he emigrates towards glorious Hollywood immediately after to directed the big-budgeted remake of another great film classic! How can France possibly build up a solid horror reputation when their prodigy-directors leave the country after just one film? "Haute Tension" was a fantastic movie and it earned director Alexandre Aja a (one-way?) ticket to the States to remake "The Hills Have Eyes" (which he did terrifically, I may add). Eric Valette's long-feature debut "Maléfique" was a very promising and engaging horror picture too, and he's already off to the Hollywood as well to direct the remake of Takashi Miike's ghost-story hit "One Missed Call". So there you have it, two very gifted Frenchmen that aren't likely to make any more film in their native country some time soon. "Maléfique" is a simple but efficient chiller that requires some patience due to its slow start, but once the plot properly develops, it offers great atmospheric tension and a handful of marvelous special effects. The film almost entirely takes place in one single location and only introduces four characters. We're inside a ramshackle French prison cell with four occupants. The new arrival is a businessman sentenced to do time for fraud, the elderly and "wise" inmate sadistically killed his wife and then there's a crazy transvestite and a mentally handicapped boy to complete the odd foursome. They find an ancient journal inside the wall of their cell, belonging to a sick murderer in the 1920's who specialized in black magic rites and supernatural ways to escape. The four inmates begin to prepare their own escaping plan using the bizarre formulas of the book, only to realize the occult is something you shouldn't mess with Eric Valette dedicates oceans of time to the character drawings of the four protagonists, which occasionally results in redundant and tedious sub plots, but his reasons for this all become clear in the gruesome climax when the book suddenly turns out to be some type of Wishmaster-device. "Maléfique" is a dark film, with truckloads of claustrophobic tension and several twisted details about human behavior. Watch it before some wealthy American production company decides to remake it with four handsome teenage actors in the unconvincing roles of hardcore criminals.