Frontier(s), part of the After Dark Horrorfest series (“8 Films To Die For”), appeared on DVD shelves this week, and in the concern of saving you some time and money, if you’ve seen any iconic horror film in the past 25 years, stay far away from this--you’ve already seen it.

The movie begins promising enough, starting in a unique, political environment: the Parisian riots. The civil unrest is shown under the opening credits in clips and flashes reminiscent of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead opener. Civilians are fighting the powers that be, police are abusing their authority, chaos rules the streets. The heroes of the story are lazily introduced through gun fights full of shaky cam, fast, indecipherable edits and lots of screaming. There’s some hinting that they’re on the lam because of a crime (viewers can assume the crime was a heist because of the money that’s referred to, plus it says so on the back of the DVD case) and they’ve got to get out of Paris, but it all adds up to weak excuses to move the action of the story elsewhere.

One of them has been shot, supporting the feel of high melodrama that overruns the first part of the film. Also, the girl in the group, Yasmine (Karina Testa), is pregnant, but she doesn’t want to bring her baby into this nightmare world. It’s her brother (the one who’s been shot) who insists that she keep it.

Our heroes break off into groups--three go to the hospital, and the other two head to a hostel at the border of France to wait for the others. The hospital run goes terribly, but the boys who go to the hostel seem like they’re doing well at first. There’s two somewhat attractive girls who run the front desk (never mind the fact that they’re weirdly silent, unsmiling, overall emo girls), and one of the guys pushes his luck, hitting on the slightly more extroverted girl with all the charm of a frat boy at Lake Tahoe. This move gets them (sort of) lucky, but also into a heap of trouble as they progressively learn more and more about the dysfunctional family who runs the hostel.

Once the others get there, it’s more of the same. The characters are trite, predictable horror movie fodder, and viewers will not weep for any of them as they go down.

More of the same is actually a great way to sum up this film. Frontier(s) blatantly rips off so many major genre films, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Descent, Hostel, stretching all the way to Misery (up to and including the cute little origin story before a character gets “hobbled”), but adds nothing new to the mix. It’s almost as if writer/director Xavier Gens (Hitman) sat in his basement, watched the movies he loved and literally lifted the scenes that worked and placed them into a shallow narrative with forgettable characters to be made and sold as something new.

Frontier(s) might actually be more enjoyable if viewers imagine different genre films thrown into the mix that were overlooked. Perhaps a Predator-type alien or maybe a silver flying ball a la Phantasm could have made things more interesting. The possibilities are endless if Gens just kept throwing old, proven-to-be-successful ideas into the narrative.

Frontier(s) also looks the same as all the other Hollywood neo-horror films: all green filters and halogen lights. The music sounds as if it came from a sampler CD for scary movies: a dirty guitar power chords over drum machines and deep bass beds. Everything in this movie is unoriginal. A fantastic example of the depth of the clichés at hand: one of the main bad guys is an ex-Nazi war criminal, and that’s something that’s never been done before.

If you’re hoping that the special effects must be something really special, look elsewhere; the film did, in fact, score an NC-17 rating, but ultimately there’s nothing here but a lot of blood, like that scene in The Descent with the pools of red. There are a small handful of effects to note near the end, but it’s still nothing audiences haven’t seen before. The fact that this film was rated NC-17 honestly doesn’t make much sense.

Frontier(s) is simply another cookie-cutter horror film which revels in a cynical scorched-earth view of the world. It’s hopeless and angry, which certainly makes sense considering the current state of the world and the increasing stranglehold the upper class has on the middle and lower classes in most First World countries, but that’s no excuse for a boring, uninventive film. If Gens wanted to make a bold political statement, perhaps he should’ve written an essay instead.

The unrated Frontier(s) DVD (Lionsgate, MSRP: $19.98) doesn’t help the case of this shoddy film. There are no special features and no commentary. The sound and picture are fine and the widescreen transfer is intact, but there is no single reason to buy (or even rent) this movie. There are too many good genre films out there to waste time on such an uninspired retread.

Frontier(s) is now available on DVD.