Hostel

OK, great. Quentin’s name is slapped on it. Is this what Horror has come to? Slasher films are just not enough with their over the top violence and instead of being creepy you just try to jam as much realistic gore and torture in as you can. No more panning away as you hear screams of agony when we can watch zoomed in removal of digits and appendages.

This type of movie is certainly horrific and would stay with me for a while and most likely creep me out. However, I would have to psyche myself up to see it as if it were a test of endurance. It seems like it would be work suffering through the violence without averting my eyes, but sticking it out because, dammit, this is going to be entertaining whether I like it or not.

If you want to see details from the movie, not just the hints in the US trailers, check out the German trailer for Hostel. I forgot the link, but it’s pretty damned graphic.

I’m happy to see Eli Roth capitalizing on the success of Cabin Fever, which was a great little gem of an indy Canadian horror film in the tradition of early Cronenberg, but I actually have remarkably little interest in Hostel. Guess I’m a genre man, and “faux snuff” doesn’t hold any attraction for me.

I just watched the theatrical trailer and three other scenes/clips on Yahoo’s site. Pretty freaky.

I had the same reaction when watching one of those Miike films. I wanted to watch and see what all the crazy love for his films was all about. Around halfway through, I felt like I was forcing myself to hold my hand over a flame for longer than the guy next to me just to prove I could do it. Then I realized the guy next to me was just a rolled up quilt and it did not care whether I shut it off and deleted it from TiVo or not.

Considering my favourite horror movies (Alien, The Shining, Jaws), have almost no gore in them, I probably won’t see Hostel. I don’t find gore scary at all, it just makes my cringe and feel sick. I find the idea of gore much scarier, which is probably why I actually enjoyed Final Destination so much. That bathroom scene was fantastic.

Edit: Five typos in three sentences? World record?

Maybe I am just old and a chickenshit. It, surprising many, hit #1. Horror ain’t dead.

I’m the same. I like horror where the bad shit happens just beyond the camera, or you see only horrible flashes of it before they switch to the next scene. Alien was on FX today btw. Still just as good as it was when I first saw it 15 years ago.

Any smart producer will tell you, horror is always a safe bet.

Went and saw it last night and it HAS to be one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while. Other than just being gore porn, it has the worst writing EVER. Don’t waste your time or money.

Awesome. This confirms my preconceived notions. Just the phrase I had in mind, too - “gore porn.”

Or merely “gorn”.

Considering I place Cabin Fever somewhere in my bottom 10 movies of all time, I’m not going to see Hostel.

I like how reviewers always come up with “these movies say something about the human condition”. I think their “human condition” is not the same as mine.

Reviewer: “I’m deep. I delve into the dark recesses of the human soul by watching Hostel”.

I think the Reviewer doesn’t have an impressive grasp of what “dark recesses” really are. So he fantasizes about torture, masochism, and murder and calls it deep, while secretly lamenting the “petty/cowardly humans” who are unwilling to go to his lengths, to explore movies like Hostel.

Reviewer: 4 stars out of 5. A harrowing take on the dark troubles that plague modern times.

The scariest place is always reality. Trying to access reality by means of fantasized exaggeration is a route that always fails.

True horror movies are playing out in Washington and other places. Perhaps not with as many silly detached body parts, but therefore with far less distractions from the deep that the reviewer ostensibly is looking for.

What horror movies really SERVE is the cultural idea of the growing darkness, and fear of that darkness, by providing a nonsensical but vaguely familiar VERSION of the culmination of the idea.

Its just another strawman. A distraction away from truth invented by people who believe they need such a distraction. And the more they believe, the more and more they see their garbage construct as “deep”.

Reviewer: 4 stars out of 5. A harrowing take…

To me Horror is about fear. I have not seen this movie, and I have no intention of watching it. I do not mind gore, but I do mind watching people getting tortured.

At least when Jason killed people, he would decapitate them and be done with it. He didn’t take 2 hours to kill one person.

I do not understand why people would ever want to see a movie like this. I find it disturbing such movies are becomming popular. Saw, Saw2, and now this. Maybe I am just getting old or maybe there is a line being crossed somewhere.

I think the best way to describe this movie is to call it “A beer commercial with torture and gore”. So, not only is it chock full of torture for no real reason, the dialogue is so offensive that it almost makes you forget about the base level of depravity that really fuels this movie.

I mostly agree with Mr. Koontz, but he should go see “One Hour Photo”

I thought One Hour Photo was a pretty good flick, if only for the crazy unexpected ending. Robin Williams makes a pretty good paranoid schizo.

…and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, Haute Tension, etc. – all movies about people being tortured and enduring being mutilated over a prolonged period of time.

I agree with you - I don’t understand how anyone likes this stuff. You could never show a movie like this if the “victims” were animals, but it’s o.k. if it’s people? It’s pretty sick stuff, but of course it’s far more common and tolerated than explicit depictions of sex, a natural and healthy act, which you essentially can’t find in a movie released in a theatre or shown on TV.

Yeah. I was thinking after reading McMaster’s post, If I’m ever chilling at somebody’s house and he’s got this film on DVD, with a bunch like it, I don’t think I’ll be kicking it at his place no more.

I find little correlation between horror and gore, except that idiot filmmakers like Rob “Better Films Have Been Directed By A” Zombie like to think there is one. Jerkoffs. I mean, repulsive stuff that isn’t necessarily gore - like The Exorcist - or quick-frame gore (like The Shining or The Ring) are about as far as you need to go to really creep a viewer out. Let the rest get filled in by your crazy nasty head.

It’s why it seems older flicks are scarier, when directors didn’t feel the need to show you everything in excrutiating detail. They had to use camera gimmickry to hide the fact that the alien is a just a dude in a rubber suit. Check the first Alien. Even Aliens, where the scary/tense bits aren’t the gory ones. It’s just them motherfucking aliens doing the things aliens do. Now, you take something like The Thing, IMO the pinnacle of horror-by-way-of-gore, okay I can dig it. Good luck recreating that groove. Even Carpenter himself can’t. The best I’ve seen of late is maybe The Sixth Sense, which uses gore (in a past-tense sense, I don’t recall any actual acts of mayhem, just the aftermaths on all the ghosts) as a storytelling device, better than most horror films I can think of.

Bottom line is, if you aren’t using gore to surprise your audience, you’re not scaring people, you’re just maybe grossing them out.

The first half is basically a softcore European porno. The second half is alright. There isn’t much suspense but there is some sick stuff, very gory at times.

I don’t feel ripped off, like Jason, but I would not watch it again.

Bill- The Thing was a tremendous thriller that featured some overthetop gore special effects. Lots of war movies have some pretty extreme gore. I just got back from Munich and it has much more gore than The Sixth Sense. I have no problem with gore. I sleep on a pile of dismembered corpses.

I don’t like movies that treat unpleasantness as a core subject matter. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake has a fair share of gore, but what it has that I find objectionable is showing people in horrible, horrible pain. That’s the hook, that’s the premise, and that’s all the movies ends up delivering. Some dude with a severed leg hung on a hook while he’s still alive begging to die is not good filmmaking. Random people getting tortured, mutilated, and then having their corpses desecrated by some psycho(s) for no good reason is not, in fact, a good premise for a movie. But I’ve just given you the treatment for every movie Desslock mentioned plus a few others.