Ils

Last night, I watched Ils, which is apparently French for Them. It's creepy as fucking hell.

Seems like it was gigging around the fest circuit for a while. I read a bunch of great reviews in the online horror forums, but it wasn't available from Netflix until very recently. It hung around in my Save file for a loooooong time.

Boy, is it worth the wait. A good-looking French couple go to a big house in the Romanian countryside for a weekend of drinking wine and screwing. That night, someone starts fucking with them, and it goes from bad to worse. Based on a true story.

Nothing we haven't seen in different versions in other movies -- there are parts that reminded me of Martin, Black Christmas and Halloween. Ils doesn't reinvent the genre or anything. It's just a really solid, creepy, suspenseful horror-thriller that isn't a remake or sequel. The opening sequence is awesome.

The French have been really stepping up to the genre plate in the last several years. They don't have the Hollywood attention J-horror's gotten, but the French genre flicks I've seen have been consistently good. Though I've noticed all of the French pics are very grounded -- all slasher, no supernatural. It's the flipside of the Asians and their wall-to-wall ghost stories. It would be cool to flip the script and get a Japanese slasher, and a French ghost story.