This here article what you see underneath this introduction was originally submitted to the good folks at The Harry Knowles Digest. Unfortunately, there was an influx of news about how Hellboy Will Own Your Ass that day, so The Duke's exquisite wordplay went unacknowledged. Here then, is the complete text of that momentous, much-bootlegged appraisal of the Switchblade Romance, known to the French as Haute Tension.

Alexandre Aja's festival favourite Haute Tension is the latest film in the enormously successful Demented Psychopath Gets Psychopathic With Regards Females franchise. You may remember other notable entries in the series, like The Burning and The Freddy Krueger Affair. There are, however, several notable differences regarding this particular outing, and for the benefit of any students of the genre what might be reading, I will present these differences to you in an easily digested yet grammatically impeccable manner.

Firstly, this one here is French, and, as such, stars French actors and actresses, and even goes so far as to be set in France.

Secondly, this one here is all controversial, and just so you remember that, we get some irrelevant shots of a woman masturbating about ten minutes in by way of putting the "super" back in superfluous, and also illustrating the controversial nature of it all. Anyone with a disposition regarding the old controversy had better be careful, because if it's anything at all, Haute Tension is controversial. Nary a scene goes past without a lashing of the old controversy.

Now, one would be forgiven for assuming that a film with a title like Haute Tension might be tense to some degree, possibly even a very high one. This, however, is to ignore the fact that the English translation of the title is not The Highest Of Tensions, or even Very Tense Indeed, but actually Switchblade Romance.

I'd imagine they decided that Haute Tension means Switchblade Romance after taking into account several pertinent factors. For one thing, Haute Tension isn't really all that tense. A suitable title might have been Middling Tension With Long Periods Of Tedium, but since that was rather unwieldy, they finally settled on Switchblade Romance. So as you don't assume it's a horror film or anything daft like that. It's a love story, don't you know, possibly involving retractable knives, but still terribly edgy and worthy and so on.

I expected great things from this. I expected to be made feel rather uncomfortable for a time, owing to the high levels of tension herein. I expected to be shocked, surprised, and to go "No, God, Please Make It Stop". Each of these prophecies were proven grossly inaccurate, however, when mine arse finally touched velvet and the whole shebang unraveled.