MARTYRS (Unrated) FRENCH HORROR Another World DVD Release Catherine Begin (Actor), Robert Toupin (Actor), Pascal Laugier (Director) Zone: PAL 2 Lang: French Subtitles: Danish Runtime 95 mins Extras: Trailer, making of No English language Product Description Lucie, a 10 year old girl, is found wandering in the streets, bruised and bloodied. Unable to say who did this to her, or why, she is placed in a hospital where she meets Anna, another young girl who had been abused. Fifteen years later, with Anna s help, Lucie sets out to get revenge on her attackers. When she believes she has found the couple who abused her, she confronts them ...and that is when the terror truly begins. Amazon.com Avoid, if you can, reading anything about Martyrs before viewing--this ultra-intense Canadian-French shocker benefits from discovering its horrors cold. In that spirit, we'll be discreet, except to note that only the most hardcore patrons of 21st-century torture cinema need apply for this one. A prologue depicts the escape of a child from an apparent house of enslavement, and one thinks of notorious real-life cases of people keeping children locked away in basements. But writer-director Pascal Laugier has a larger idea in mind, which we begin to discern when the story skips ahead 15 years. The kidnapped girl, now played by Mylene Jampanoi, is bent on a violent rampage of her own; her lifelong friend and minder (Morjana Alaoui) comes upon a bloody scene too late. The film takes too long to get to the next revelation, but when it does, a series of secret chambers begins to unfold in the narrative, and you might just feel your head spinning (if not your gorge rising). It would be inaccurate to call this pleasant, or even entertaining, but Laugier does at least have a serious purpose and some interesting ideas. The horrifying images he creates, however, raise the question of directorial judgment gone haywire. Give him credit, though: the DVD of Martyrs includes a brief introduction by Laugier in which he (good-humoredly) apologizes for the movie--fair warning for the faint of heart. --Robert Horton ************************************************************* MINT CONDITION - SHRINK WRAPPED ************************************************************ CLICK BACK BUTTON IN BROWSER TO GO BACK TO THE MENU BIG REVIEW: 5.0 out of 5 stars Hideously Brilliant Reviewed in the United States ???? on October 20, 2012 Verified Purchase Whenever I've mentioned this movie to my friends I've always told them that "I've seen it, I love it, and I would never watch it again." I'm more then willing to lend them the DVD, but I won't watch it with them. I've been a horror fan for years, and when you love the genre enough to step outside of the American schlockfests that get wheeled into theaters it's a delight to find the trends that are occurring in foreign horror. I'm not entirely sure why France has lent itself to such good horror, but the French New Wave is like a graduate school for those sick of the tedium of Paranormal Activity and Saw, willing to redefine the limits of horror in a truly inspired and creative way unlike the dull nihilistic extremism of something like The Human Centipede films. A lot of people cite High Tension, Frontier(s), Inside, and Martyrs as the hallmarks of the genre, and for the most part this is true. Martyrs is different because more than all the others it is an endurance test of a film, and while it could absolutely be categorized as so-called "torture porn" it chooses to use the conventions of the genre to enhance the structure of the film rather than wallow around in gore (although there is plenty of that). Its really difficult to proceed much farther in the review without dancing into some kind of spoiler, but I assure you that I will stick to plot events that occur in the first ten minutes of the film. We have Lucie, a young girl who was violently tortured for weeks as a child who managed to escape but is pursued by a mysterious demonic creature who seems to want to inflict pain upon her. Years later Lucie believes that she has found those people who were responsible for her torture and bursts into their house with a shotgun, killing a couple and their son and daughter. She then calls her childhood friend Anna, who is panicked that Lucie might have found the wrong people, to come help her. That's as far as I can go, and I believe that its all the information that you should have going into the film (if you're curious enough to look up the trailer on Youtube, don't, it spoils everything and makes the movie look like its something that it's not). Director Pascal Laugier approaches his material with relentless, cold efficiency and interlaces his plot with a sense of real mystery that is intoxicating as a viewer. Even at the film's most harrowing points, when you have to look away from the screen (if this honestly doesn't happen for you, see a psychiatrist), you can sense that the scene has a purpose and you find yourself saying "it'll be over in a minute, I have to see what comes next." Every character has a motivation that is understandable on some level (even some sick levels), every actor enlisted performs their job in a masterful way (especially Catherine Begin, who's midpoint monologue is among the most chilling in cinema) and nobody is simply evil for evil's sake. In the film's second half the plot takes on philosophical overtones, which climax in a gut-wrenching ending that left me staring at the credits trying to collect myself for a good five minutes. I don't have nightmares from slasher movies anymore. Jason and Leatherface can brandish as many knives and chainsaws as they want and I'll usually just eat popcorn and forget about it once I leave the theater. I had nightmares after watching Martyrs. It's a kind of movie that gets under your skin, and if that sounds like a good time for you then its a movie that's worth your time. It is rumored to be gearing up for an American remake under the hand of Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism) and from the producers of Twilight. With those clues alone it feels like they might try to cram it into a PG-13 box (as it is, its pushing NC-17), and Stamm has stated that he will be changing the ending if the movie does indeed get made in order to make the movie more upbeat. I can absolutely assure you that doing that will ruin everything that makes this movie special, and so I highly recommend watching this before the American remake spoils it.