BUZZ CUT Cecile de France gets carried away with the yardwork.

The plot of High Tension is simplicity itself: Hot babe (the buff and appallingly gorgeous de France) drives with hot babe friend (Le Besco) to the latter's rural family home for a weekend of studying. Night falls and a big ugly guy in a big ugly truck pulls up to the isolated house, rings the doorbell, brutally slaughters some ancillary characters and takes Babe Number Two captive in chains. Babe Number One, traumatized but unchained, must free her friend while evading detection. It may not sound like much, but there's a 45-minute stretch in this movie that's as flat-out frightening as anything ever committed to celluloid, thanks primarily to razor-sharp editing and a superbly manipulative use of sound.

Wunderkind director Aja, 26, is plainly a horror geek of the highest order, and on one level his film is nothing but a mosaic of bits from classic shockers of the past four decades. But the borrowed parts are too well-integrated to permit Tarantinoid spot-the-reference games, at least on first viewing. Regrettably, Aja compromises the linear purity of this nightmare in the final reel with a hokey psychological plot twist that will only work for those whose minds are very easily blown. But that's a fairly minor cavil given the malevolent perfection of what comes before.—Cliff Doerksen