Customer Reviews

Frenchman's Farm

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Superbly filmed, well made, very creepy, and exceptionally interesting for a horror movie.

None of the silliness that infects so many horror films, no explosions, boring car chases at high speeds with guns being fired all over the place.

Thank goodness! Just a highly absorbing tale with nice touches of horror, and a truly chilling ghost in the flashback sequences.

It starts off almost as though it's going to be one of those science fiction movies where one is taken back in time, in this case to the 1940s where the heroine of the movie sees a murder committed and then finds herself back in the present day, where she sets about solving the mystery that she encounters when researching what she saw in the time warp flashback.

I never lost interest once througout the movie. Very good indeed!

Some questions left remaining at the end, but all in all, a very effective

film, I would have liked it to have gone on for longer, and the ghost looks truly malevolent.

What attracted me to Frenchman's Farm (1987) was the VHS-cover including the distressed expression on the aforementioned Frenchman's face.....or so I thought. As the story developed it turned into your strangely unsettling creepy mystery/thrillers; the chases, the screams, the gore and then the compelling ending. But this one film did not have your ordinary ending, a great twist on a classic tale.

I only wish other films could have been so inventive. A true classic, worthy of all the praise it receives, if not for the sheer brilliant malevolence of the script but for the twist greatness of the end. I came across this movie whilst going through an 80's B-movie phase.

After seeing this one on the shelf in the video store's horror section in the late 80's, I was at first impressed that this one got released on DVD and decided to give it a try. But this exercise in boredom deserved to stay buried in video obscurity; I would think even the most diehard horror fan alive would have a hard time staying awake during this one.

For what it's worth, the story: a girl goes driving in the Australian countryside and her car breaks down. Inexplicably, time starts moving backwards and she ends up in the 1940's, where she witnesses a goreless decapitation. She gets chased by the murderer, manages to start her car again, and zaps back to the present. Of course, no one will believe her story, so she begins a long, drawn-out process of investigating to prove it.

This is more of a lame mystery than a horror movie. There's no gore and no real scares. The killer (the Frenchman) is pretty sinister-looking when he does appear, but he has limited minutes here. Many scenes are too dark to make out details, which seems to be a combination of poor lighting when shooting, and the fact that no real remastering of the movie seems to have been done. I would think owning this on video (if you had to) would result in the same picture quality. The extras on the DVD's are weak as well.

So save your money. If you want cheesy 80's horror that's at least entertaining, try Pieces, Humanoids from the Deep, Mother's Day, My Bloody Valentine...jeez, pick a movie at random and it's bound to be better than Frenchman's Farm.