Really good, funny and believable. The film avoids getting sentimental but is still quite touching largely thanks to Billy Bob Thornton's charismatic performance. Terry Zwigoff, like Richard Linklater, deserves a wider audience than the art house/indie crowd his films normally attract.
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So the story is this: A student and her friend go to a her parents house to do some studying. In the night a creepy French guy in a boiler suit arrives (it's set in France by the way) and calmly and methodically begins to carve up the family. From the begining the film really lives up to its French title (Haute Tension) and is a solid homage to 70s slasher films. Whilst the killer is generic, from the Michael Myers/Leatherface lumbering and implacable school, the whole is stylishly shot, effective and uncomfortable viewing. Complementing this visual flair are some great perfomances espescially Cécile De France who owns just about every scene, not your typical horror Final Girl.
Unfortunately the film mis-fires in the final reel with a twist that's incredibly clumsy and shoots gaping holes in the plot. When you watch a film the whole thing is filtered though your memory of the last scenes, you can start poorly but no one's going to care if you finish on a high. If you mess up the finale there's no chance to redeem yourself and ultimately Switchblade romace dissapoints for this reason, leaving you going 'wha...?' instead of 'woah!'.
IMDB
Starter for ZZzzz... more like. OK, that didn't really work. Suffice it to say that this film is the precise mid-point of the mediocrity in the middle of the, genreally failry mediocre anyway, British film industry. Actually some of it is bad though. The performances are OK (except for Rebeca Hall for whom I predict good things, or at least a role in a Richard Curtis film at some point. Oh, and Mark Gatiss' comedy Bamber Gascoigne is good too), though the lead is pretty unlikable. The story is faultlessly predicatable (guess what, the blonde one who wants to be famous is not the TRUE LOVE), the soundtrack is faultlessly nostalgic (in a kind of Q/Mojo/Uncut way), the cinematography, editing and direction are all competant. And that's about it for the mediocre.
For the bad: If you're going to set something in Bristol and film some of it there why don't you just film the rest of it there, why film some of it at UCL? Why film scenes of Manchester in Shepherds Bush? Why pretend you can drive from Bristol to Manchester in 2 hours? The tone of the film fluctuates queasily between gritty (well Brassed Off level gritty) scenes of THATCHERS BRITAIN and comedy clowning about. Also I have objections to do with the films ideas about the purpose of education that are too lengthy and dull to go into here and didn't really diminish my limited enjoyment of the film.
Basically whilst it's a decade out, the themes of coming of age, and negotiating British class structure are much better handled in last years TV adaptation The Rotters Club. A comparison that's impossible to avoid making because Alice Eve plays pretty much the same character in both (though the Starter For 10 version is a purely 2D version).
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