Frontier(s)

Directed by Xavier Gens. With Karina Testa, Aurélien Wiik and Patrick Ligardes. Distributed by After Dark Films. 1 hour, 48 mins.

NC-17

(Extreme violence, sadism, gore, Nazism). Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse.

Xavier Gens' Frontier(s), which is the latest entry in the French Horror New Wave (Inside, High Tension, Maléfique), is a deeply disturbing, unapologetically brutal exercise in torture porn.

But Gens tries to transcend the film's genre by using the basic structure of the classics, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, to spin a hyperbolic parable about ethnic strife in France.

The film is set during the riots that in November engulfed Paris' banlieues - the rough, ghetto-like suburban enclaves, home to an overwhelming number of Paris' Muslim underclass.

Four young bank robbers try to escape the riots - and the cops - by driving to Amsterdam. But once in the French countryside, they fall prey to a sadistic family of in-bred, Nazi cannibals.

Led by an ancient former Nazi officer, the family torture and carve up everyone except for the lovely Yasmine, who is kept so she can breed with "Nazi Guy's" son.

Gens wallows too long on the gore, and his film is far too blunt an instrument to properly analyze its political themes. But for all its faults, Frontier(s), which also is due out on DVD on Tuesday (www.frontiersunrated.com), will delight fans with its hyperkinetic pace, gruesomely beautiful photography, and operatic violence. It's a grody exploitation flick all right, but one that actually says something of note about the legacy of ethnic hatred in Europe.

- Tirdad Derakhshani