Let's say that sometime in the next six to 12 months, you're in your favourite video store looking for a French movie about city kids plunged into a nighmarish rural hell.

If you come across director Xavier Gens' Frontiere(s) during your search, keeping on looking. Don't stop until you find Haute Tension, Calvaire or Sheitan, which is da bomb of the three!

Actually, Frontiere(s) screens again on Friday, but it ain't worth paying TIFF prices to see it, my friends.

The basic plotline is that four young people from the Paris suburbs flee after participating in riots related to the swearing-in of an extremely right-wing president.

They are to rendezvous at a creepy inn somewhere in the countryside, presumably near the border with Belgium. If you've ever seen any horror movie (but most notably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), you know where this is going.

As I watched it, however, I really feel like I was watching parts of Sheitan over again. At least two characters appear to be taken directly from the earlier film (actually, a third has the same name as a female character in Sheitan). One character, Goethe, even tries to deliver the same type of maniacal cackle of Vincent Cassel's unforgettable Joseph character. But, er, not as well.

Unlike Sheitan, which has audacious scenes galore and is hysterically funny in places, Frontiere(s) is conventional, predictable and humourless. If you like ultraviolence, there's plenty of that, but it's laid on so thick that the effect is numbing rather than visceral. There was about three seconds of applause after it ended and then the audience streamed out past the director.

Skip it.