Eli Roth’s Hostel movies are notoriously violent and gory. They’re supposed to have inaugurated a new, updated version of horror cinema — torture porn, which is supposedly more explicit, more stomach-churning, and more sadistic than anything that came before.
So I was…not exactly startled, but maybe mildly disappointed/pleased to discover that the new boss is the same as the old boss. The Hostel films aren’t exponentially worse than any other horror film I’ve seen. They’re just basic slashers, with medieval torture devices as killing gimmicks. Effectively graphic, sure, but not moreso than Freddy’s macabre dreamscape liquefying, or even really than Jason’s trusty weapons, blunt or edged.
That’s not to say that Hostel has no new tricks up its bloody apron. On the contrary. Slashers are generally built around an axis of violence/revenge. You have some horrible all-powerful Thing, which systematically tortures and murders in an apotheosis of satisfying sadism. And then, in the second half, the poles are switched, hunter becomes hunted, and that big bad Thing is remorselessly brutalized. That’s why it makes sense to think of rape/revenge films as slashers; it’s the same basic dynamic, just with rape instead of murder (and/or, alternately, slashers can be seen as rape/revenge films with the murder substituting — often not especially subtly — for rape.)
As the rape/revenge comparison makes clear, slashers often get their energy from gender animosity. Everybody in slashers is being punished for something, but one of the most common acts which elicits punishment is sexual activity. This goes for guys too, but, of course, the audience and the male gaze being what they are, there’s generally a lot more interest in seeing the girl’s bare all…and then to have them punished either hypocritically for provoking desire, or more straightforwardly for not satisfying it. And after the punishing, you switch in the final half and identify with the female/victimized punished, who now gets to dismember the killer/rapist, so the audience can both revel in her sadistic accomplishment and enjoy the masochistic thrill of castration.
Gender isn’t the only lever that works here; slashers often instead (or also) use class animosity to power their fantasies of alternating sadism/masochism. So in The Hills Have Eyes, we watch the deformed feral reprobates battle the city folk. And, of course, the city folk get punished for being city folk, and the reprobates get punished for being reprobates, and the studio audience gets to hate/love both and revel in their pain/brutality.
Eli Roth is I’m sure perfectly aware of all these dynamics (I’d bet he’s read Carol Clover Men, Women, and Chainsaw just like I have.) And in Hostel, he very cleverly tweaks them. Rather than fitting the murder/revenge onto the primary binary man/woman, or rich/poor, he changes it up,and fits it onto the division American/foreigner — or perhaps more accurately, Westerner/Easterner. The movie insightfully realizes that the most loathsome, vile, and worthless people on the planet are American frat boys on tour…and it gleefully sets out to torture them to death. But it also and simultaneously taps into the all-American nightmare of the decadent Europe/East with its forbidden pleasures and unspeakable corruption. In short, Hostel is like a Henry James novel with severed fingers, screaming, and nudity.
The nudity and the sex is quite important, not just for its prurient value, but thematically. As I said, slashers usually revel in the animosities of gender…but they usually do it by making the women the victims (first…and then later the victimizer.) Roth, though, shuffles the roles. It’s the American backpackers (and their Scandinavian friend) who are presented first as sexual aggressors. For them, Europe — and especially that Hostel in Slovakia — is a pornutopia — a place to pull out their money and their balls and go to town (or, alternately, in the case of sensitive guy Josh, a place to whine on a shoulder about his lost love, and then pull out money, balls, etc.) The Westerners’ casual sense of entitlement — their belief that, yeah, Europe is basically a hole to stick their bits in — is both their downfall and what makes them deserve their downfall. Probably the best scene in the film is when backpacker Paxton (Jay Hernandez) staggers away from the eviscerated Josh to confront Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova), one of those available girls, who, he now realizes, had set them up to begin with. “You bitch!” he screams at her, to which she responds, with great gusto, “I get a lot of money for you, and that makes you MY bitch.”
That’s the slasher in a nutshell; I’m your bitch, then you’re mine. The Americans rule the world and use their money to turn everyone into meat in their entertainment abattoir — but that makes them basically as dumb as their stupid trimmed foreskins, and this one woman, at least, has reversed both the entertainment and the abattoir on behalf of the whole damn world. Now, at last, for exorbitant prices, the shady middlemen will arrange for you to fuck those Americans up, down, and sideways, just as they’ve always, through those middlemen, done to you.
But inevitably those corrupt Europeans can’t get let off that easy. Paxton manages to escape, aided (more symbolically than diegetically) by the cross-cultural juju imparted by his knowledge of German. And it’s there, unfortunately, that the movie starts to be too clever for its own good — or maybe Roth’s cleverness just failed him. Either way, Roth’s set-up is so elaborate — what with the entire village involved in the conspiracy and wealthy out-of-towners coming in from all over Europe to get a literal piece of the other — that by the time we get to the end of the thing, it’s hard to figure out where the revenge fits in. Thus the director has to put his hand, and then a couple of feet on the scales of justice to make everything work out. And so, while fleeing, Paxton just so happens to see Natasha and her deceitful friend wander out in front of his car so he can run them over. Then, a little later, he coincidentally ends up in the same train as the creepy Dutch businessman who murdered his friend.
In a really satisfying (or bleak, same difference) revenge narrative, like “I Spit on My Graves” or “Straw Dogs,” or “Death Proof”, or even “Friday the 13th IV”, the violence/reverse violence is remorseless pendulum; the axe goes forward, the axe goes back, as sure as the world turning round its bloody sun. With Hostel, though, you can see the implement of destruction fall to the wayside, so that the director has to go pick it up, paint some gore on there, and hand it back to the befuddled protagonist. You never really believe that Paxton is a cold killer; he hasn’t found his inner resources, and/or lost his soul. He just happened to be the guy picked to be standing at the end, and the guy standing at the end has to take revenge. The plot and the genre conventions just never quite manage to reconcile themselves to each other.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the dynamics of globalization can be fit only uncomfortably on the slasher binaries. Men/women, upper class/lower class — those are old, old hatreds, graceful in their cthonic simplicity. Capitalism, though, is multipolar and diffuse. It isn’t here or there, but everywhere; there is no one bad guy, like Jason or Freddy, but a technology of pleasure which distributes sadism and desire to everyone and no one. Roth takes great pains to allow Paxton to kill the individuals who tormented him and his friends, but the supposed catharsis dissipates into clumsy anti-climax. The sexy girls may have suckered Paxton; the Dutch businessman may have murdered his friend, but the real enemy isn’t either sexy girls or businessman. The real enemy is the system that uses money to transform people into things — a system of such overwhelming power, with its tendrils in so many aspects of society (the hostel, the village, the police…the world?) that there’s never even a question of confronting it. The capitalism in Hostel corrodes it’s belief in its own rape/revenge empowerment fantasy — and without that faith in its genre, the end of the film comes across more adrift than driven.
Which is, perhaps, why Roth made an almost unheard of choice for an exploitation sequel, and substantially changed his formula. Oh, sure, the Hostel is still there, and the basic set up — the Slovakia setting, the torture, etc. etc., is all in place, and the victims are still three backpackers. In this case, though, the backpackers are women — which instantly rearranges many of the tensions of the last film. The three protagonists here are going to enjoy a spa, not to screw native girls. From an early scene where they’re menaced by creepy assholes on the way to Slovakia, they’re always presented as vulnerable and endangered, not as exploiters.
Moreover, Hostel II is at least as interested in the logistics of its torture auction, and in the torture-purchasers, as it is in the victims. Stuart and Todd, who buy the chance to torture our heroines, are a lot like the vacuous American fratboys in the first film — only these guys are far enough along in their careers that they can purchase more expensive meat.
By spending so much time showing us the mechanics of doom, Hostel II cheerfully chucks most of its suspense; we know what’s going to happen already, after all. The first film began as a callow road comedy and slid slowly towards horror; the second, though, teeters on farce from beginning to end. If the emblematic moment in the first movie is the scene where Natasha reveals to Paxton whose bitch is whose, the quintessential scene in the second film probably occurs when poor awkward Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) is strung up naked in the air over a bath ringed with candles. The hulking Eastern European guards go about with a bored efficiency positioning Lorna just right, lighting all those wicks, and then, with businesslike nonchalance, exiting stage right. Shortly thereafter, a woman comes in, strips naked, lies in the bath, and begins chopping at Lorna with a scythe so that she can bathe in her blood. The combination of banality and hyperbolic decadence isn’t even especially suspenseful; instead, it comes across more as a knowing, gleeful snicker. You want tits and torture brought directly to the comfort of your boring home? No problem; just wait a second while we hit the lights, put everything in place, and then saunter off camera….
Most of the torture scenes are like that; more Three Stooges than Hannibal Lecter. While menacing his victim, Todd accidentally unplugs his chain saw…then on a second try slips and accidentally cuts her face in half before he meant to, leading him to give up on the project altogether (since he refuses to finish the kill, violating his contract, the guards shrug and turn the dogs on him.)
Even the climactic Final Girl escape is a deliberate anti-climax. She triumphs not through smarts or strength (though she does exhibit both of those) but rather through sheer force of capital. Beth (Lauren German) is, as it turns out, really, really rich, and she simply extricates herself by dumping a ton of money in the lap of Sasha (Milan Kažko), the businessman in charge. In this case, the phallus of potency and power isn’t a gun or a knife; it’s cash, as Beth demonstrates decisively when, just before striding out of her cell, she snips off her tormenters balls — prompting all the scruffy guards to flinch as one.
That’s a pretty entertaining finish, and perhaps the film should have just ended there. Once again, though, Roth has to choose between being true to his capitalist vision and fulfilling his slasher tropes…and he chooses the second. Beth gets inducted into the evil fellowship of lucre, up to and including having to get the secret sign of the bloodhound tattooed on her butt. She’s an initate…and the first thing she does with her newfound status is to go out into the town and kills with her own hands willowy two-faced Axelle (Vera Jordanova) — the frenemy who tricked her into coming to the hostel in the first place.
That’s how slashers are supposed to resolve — with an eye for an eye. But in this context it just seems kind of dumb. I mean, why bother? Beth doesn’t become powerful by killing Axelle; she’s already — and even from the beginning — more powerful than anyone in the film. She can, as one of her friends says, buy the entire town, hostel and all. It wasn’t that, like most Final Girls, she was first weak and then found something within her that could be strong. On the contrary, though we didn’t know it, she always was the biggest one in the room tougher than Jason, more all-powerful than Freddy.
This isn’t, then, about Beth learning to be strong. Nor is it about Beth fighting off her killer and thereby becoming a killer herself. On the contrary, the issue is not her soul but her bank account. Personal, individual revenge in this context seems quaint. After all, if she wanted to, Beth could have just paid Sasha to take Axelle into the dungeon, and watched as some random penny-ante punter cut her to pieces. Hell, she could have paid the guards to do the same to Sasha; why not? She’s got the money.
Roth seems determined to ignore this insight. Like that weird Dutch businessman in the first film who eats salad with his trembling hands because he wants to feel “that connection with something that died for you,” Roth is wedded to that old-fashioned Old Testament slasher morality, where you take a life for a life, person to person. But sympathetic as he is to genre tradition, Roth’s films end up being about newer gods — gods that are only more fearsome because they never get their hands dirty.
Oh, God, Noah…if you could see some of the noxious American frat boys who come to Paris at spring break…well, you’d be muttering to all and sundry “um, actually, I’m Canadian.”
The film couldn’t be much better at illustrating that. Don’t know how you feel about slashers, but if you have any affection for the genre and any animosity towards American backbackers, I suspect it’d be pretty cathartic.
Or you could just watch the first 45 minutes or so. It really doesn’t get gruesome till the second half…
I enjoyed these movies, and I like the way you point out the way they shift the slasher formula to one of American/foreigner; that’s why they pay you the big bucks. Amusingly, reading your take on the first movie, I was thinking, “Ah, but that’s addressed in the sequel!” and then you got to that point exactly. One thing you didn’t note, probably to avoid spoilers, is that the pendulum of murder/revenge works in the opening scene, in which the surviving guy from the first movie gets killed right away.
Also, I recall Quentin Tarantino, who produced the movies, going on a talk show around the time of the first film’s release and saying that it was their attempt to do a Takeshi Miike film. Notably, Miike makes a cameo, as a Japanese client of the hostel. That was neat.
Oh, and I liked that banality of the guards that you mentioned, the way it’s almost a comment on the filmmakers themselves. I thought the opening scene of the first movie was especially effective, with a guy whistling casually while he’s cleaning and mopping up blood and teeth and such.
Nah; I never care about spoilers. I thought about mentioning it, but didn’t bother I think because it’s a fairly tried and true formula at this point…I think the survivor gets killed off at the beginning of one of the Friday 13th films for example…
I missed the Miike cameo! I think the Cannibal Holocaust director shows up too….
He’s got a line that’s something like “If you’re not careful, you’ll spend all your money here.”
Oh yeah, I also wanted to say that while I agree that the final revenge in the second film isn’t really necessary, that scene of the kids playing soccer with the girl’s head is a great moment to end the movie on.
It’s a decent joke.
Yeah, it’s probably Takeshi Miike and other Japanese directors who really pushed the envelope before Hostel. Especially “Audition” considering how widely distributed it was on video here.
The thing about Hostel is…is it really that gory? They do that standard horror movie trick where they cut away at the last minute a good bit…. I guess the most viscerally unpleasant bit was where he cut off the woman’s hanging eyeball…. It just seemed so fake and clearly cheesy that it was hard to take it seriously. As far as something that was actually hard to sit through, Funny Games was much more unpleasant….
Have you read Kim Newman’s updated edition of Nightmare Movies? He did an extensive chapter on torture porn (everything from Haneke to Gibson’s Passion of Christ to Pasolini’s Salo) and I laughed out loud at his characterization of Haneke “look at what you made me do!”. A Serbian film came a bit after the book, sadly.
But the book was just too extensive for me. I read some chapters but didnt bother with most, I love horror but I dont like the films a whole lot, especially not to read about so many mountains of films I’d never want to see. I really feel sorry for Newman that he had to endure all those disaster films and wild animal films among other swathes of dreck. There is also a part about christian “end times” movies made by christians on shoestring budgets. Another thing that made me laugh was when he described a 70s film as “authentically tawdry and upsettingly british”.
I asked you roughly two weeks ago about Hong Kong films like Red To Kill, Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome etc. Nothing about them in the Newman book, I think people need to write about them more, they are very political and some of the most shocking films ever. I’ve only seen Red To Kill, but I saw the infamous scene from Untold Story on youtube.
Miike’s Masters Of Horror episode Imprint is really tough going.
Hey Robert. I haven’t seen any of those Hong Kong films you mention…nor much Miike, honestly. I haven’t even seen Audition (lame, I know…)
Whenever Miike comes up, I have to say that he can do any type of film. Great Yokai War (despite the terrible cgi) is one of the most beautiful family films ever. Bird People Of China is also nothing like most of his films, quiet lovely and brilliant.
Oh yeah, Miike is awesome. His favorite genre seems to be horror, and he’s pretty amazing at inducing cringes, with Audition, Imprint, and Ichi the Killer being some of the hardest-to-watch movies I’ve seen. He’s also great at coming up with stuff that you just can’t believe you just saw. The final moments in the first and third installments of the Dead or Alive trilogy are some of my favorites, and the climax of The Great Yokai War made me laugh out loud at the bizarre way the villain was defeated.
But yeah, he’s so versatile, he seems to be able to do anything. I’m looking forward to checking out his Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney movie when I get the chance.
“He’s also great at coming up with stuff that you just can’t believe you just saw”
There’s a great bit like that in Bird People Of China, just so abrupt and like nothing else in the film, very funny.
Great Yokai War’s ending was so exciting I was almost crying (I cry when overexcited, does anyone else do that?). Note the Shigeru Mizuki cameo.
No way, Shigeru Mizuki? I don’t think I knew who he was when I first saw that movie. I’ll have to watch it again now, which is easy enough, since I have it on DVD.
“The thing about Hostel is…is it really that gory? ”
For American mainstream, yes it was. The finger dismemberment scene pushed things that much over the top. Maybe it was old hat for small-budget American films at that point in time? Or in seventies horror movies?
I think the way it usually works in horror is that the protagonist emerges at the end completely unscathed after having several very close calls.
The 3 Miike films you can’t live without: Ichi, Audition and Visitor Q. I don’t think he’s ever surpassed those.
A good recent Hong Kong horror film is Dream Home, which is a good expression of rage at the housing situation over there.
And some good Japanese directors to make you squirm, but not necessarily due to gore: Koji Wakamatsu (Go, Go, Second Time Virgin), Kazuo Hara (Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On), and Yasuzo Masumura (Blind Beast). But if you just want to be sickened or feel generally demoralized, try the Guinea Pig series. I really don’t think anyone’s quite as out there as the Japanese at this sort of thing. A Serbian Film doesn’t seem as bad to me as Legend of the Overfiend, which is a cartoon. Although I guess the French and the Italians have given it a pretty good shot. American cinema just can’t compete. I think it has to do with the mixture of exploitation and ideological intent that makes the foreigners so much more offensive. I did like Hostel 2’s homage to giallo, though. Part 1 just sucked.
Why didn’t you like the first Hostel film?
Legend Of The Overfiend doesnt bother me at all, people often hold it up as this monument to fucked-up-ness but it is extremely tame compared to what I’ve seen come out the ero-guro genre. Some of the Overfiend sequels were astoundingly boring.
I actually havent seen any Hostel, Saw, Paranormal Activity(not the same subgenre) films, A Serbian Film, Antichrist, Cannibal Holocaust, Funny Games and Benny’s Video. As I said in the Funky Flashman thread, I stopped trying to be an expert because it results in paying serious time and money for hours upon hours of boredom and none of the aforementioned films sound interesting to me despite the hype. That’s why I’m in two minds about watching the films Domingos recommended, I’m generally bored by canon works and I suspect that just like some Kirby fans, people forgive the art house and trash masters for being boring because they brought something interesting and vital to the table and get overpraised for that. I’m wanting to see some Parajanov films now and I hope I’ll like them.
Charles- how much of Miike have you seen to know that? His filmography is enormous. I’ve only seen about 7 or 8 films of his and that only scratches the surface. I thought 13 Assassins was okay, there is a deleted scene (that I’m not sure if it is okay to find hilarious but it made me laugh) that they should have kept in the film but it might have really changed the verdict of the film.
“I think it has to do with the mixture of exploitation and ideological intent that makes the foreigners so much more offensive”
This is Hong Kong films exactly. Even their mainstream romantic comedies and martial arts films are a field day for cultural/political discussion. It was not uncommon for 70s-90s films to be full of rampant sexism, homophobia and racism. Some films had a serious hostility towards japanese. It is really sad how Hong Kong martial arts films have became so much like hollywood blockbusters and their horror films more like J-horror.
The extreme hong kong films are noted for their extreme exploitation mixed with sincere socialpolitical messages. What makes this trend so bizarre to me that some of these films win awards and their practitioners go on to more mainstream success (Raimi and Jackson did funny gore films, but if they did these sort of films, they never would have got into hollywood), I read that this is also a time when Sammo Hung’s career took a plunge because he got divorced and a HK film journalist speculated he would have remained more successful if he simply cheated on his wife. How does this conservatism co-exist with Untold Story being such a success?
Red To Kill is about a severely disturbed rapist preying on a mentally disabled girl and her protector in a home for the disabled. The rape scenes are what most people what call exploitative or pornographic, many scenes and the lighting recall Argento’s giallo. The disabled home is disrespected by the surrounding community, people treat the disabled like animals not worth looking after and the court of law simply doesnt care if the girl has been raped. The combination of the furiously deranged rapist and the ignorance/neglect toward the disabled make this a really upsetting film, I’ve read some people say it made them cry.
A lot of these these films seem to concern a violent rampage of someone who has lost their mind. Ebola Syndrome has a guy just going around attacking people and spreading his disease( the film is said to be missing many scenes that cannot be recovered, who knows how bad the uncut thing would be). Untold Story has a scene in which a guy ties up a woman and several children, terrorizes them, bites off the womans cheek, chases after the screaming children and beheads them all one after the other.
It has been said that Hostel and even A Serbian Film felt curiously tame considering what goes on in them. I gave up trying to be an extremist taboo artist because my heart wasnt in it, but I still get the hunger for a real transgressive thrill and it seems really uncommon to me. I’ve seen hundreds of sicko art but most of it seems sort of banal.
I have a certain sympathy for Benjamin Marra’s cravings and Manga Zombie’s opinion that “manga should rot the brain” but extremity by itself goes nowhere. I’ve seen so many porn comics that feature some of the worst taboos executed with genuine nasty glee but I would never endorse them, they just seem so lacking in anything artistically compelling. They can be morbidly fascinating and deeply offensive but not much else.
The thing that makes these Hong Kong films seem worthwhile to me is their rage and energy.
I’m always trying to pimp out Shinya Tsukamoto on the internet and people always seem unresponsive, but I’m convinced he is constantly on the tip of being massive but just never gets the right push. I’m really glad The Story Of Film featured him (but only for Tetsuo, sadly). He is the cinematic brother of Cronenberg, Miike and Sogo Ishii. Miike said in the foreward to the Tom Mes Tsukamoto book “I’ll never beat this guy”, he believed Tsukamoto is genuinely far crazier than himself, in his own perhaps quieter way.
Everyone should see Tokyo Fist, Vital, A Snake Of June and Haze. I order you!
Then Sogo Ishii and Shozin Fukui need to be pimped out if you liked Tsukamoto.
Oh right; I did see and enjoy 13 assassins.
Like I said, I don’t think Hostel is especially extreme; it’s a slasher film. It’s smart and clever and often funny though. I definitely enjoyed watching it.
Part of the reason I’ve not seen Hostel films (other than not being interested in the premise) is that I’ve sometimes been put off by Roth’s fannishness and justifications for his films and some of the stuff he associates with (he appeared in the utterly terrible 2001 Maniacs). I dont like the fannish attitudes of Roth, Snyder and Tarantino, and when they try to defend their work by trying to make it seem super sophisticated, it just sounds very unconvincing.
I didnt mind Cabin Fever, but some of the characters were a bit Kevin Smithish, but the thing about the smiling bowling man was hilarious.
I forgot to mention Martyrs, which has traditional terror in the first 20 mins( which has the immensely rare quality of being genuinely terrifying)and goes onto being a very interesting and harrowing torture porn movie. It rightfully made Laugier a serious director to watch. Laugier said he liked Saw and Hostel but thought of Martyrs as a different spin on the subgenre.
I think I recall Paul Thomas Anderson defending Saw and Hostel.
A late comment, to come back to the notion that otherness in horror is primarily approached through the prism of gender. It is certainly a convincing point and that explains why the Clover/Creed line of analysis has been so influential.
Still the geographical “other” has also been a recurrent feature of the genre for a long time. “Obnoxious Americans coming to have a good time and encoutering a gruesome fate” is a pretty good summary of Deliverance, for instance. The American South used to play that role, but replacing it with Eastern Europe is not a great generic leap.
I must confess the article and comments convinced me to watch Hostel 2. The frequent comparison with the terrible Saw franchise had convinced me to stay away from Roth’s films, but they actually sound much more interesting.
Right; Deliverance is definitely a touchstone. Class and regional issues are frequently conflated in the genre, which I tried to get at but maybe didn’t articulate clearly enough. I do think that it’s a clever and significant shift, though, to go from national regional binaries (which Clover talks about too, incidentally) to a global one. Roth goes to some lengths to connect it specifically to global capital too (as opposed to Straw Dogs, which is transnational but still basically built around an urban/rural axis rather than an American/everyone else one.)
“Everyone should see …. A Snake Of June….”
I didn’t think much of that one. So an unfulfilled wife comes to view her stalker as her marriage’s salvation. Mainly an excuse to expose the lead actress’ body. Couldn’t have been slighter.
Tsukamoto expected a really negative reaction to the film but was surprised to find it being one of the best received films. Catherine Breillat championed it (but she is known for making feminist films that dont sit comfy with a lot of people). It actually isnt one of my favorites, I named it because other people seem to think it is one of his best, but I genuinely love the other three.
I think the symbolist imagery is really strong and the theme about the city and its people being affected by the weather. One of Tsukamoto’s main themes across all his work is the oppressiveness of Tokyo and similar cities and how they have a sterilizing effect on people, that really means something to me. He says the rain season awakens the senses in Tokyo. He also said his earlier ideas for the film were far more pornographic. I still like it but I dont find it as exciting as most of his films.
His newest film is just about out on dvd.
I am compelled to note that two of the Guinea Pig movies were written and directed by mangaka Hideshi Hino, who’s actually a pretty broad, cartoony stylist… sort of Mizuki as filtered through Yoshiharu Tsuge. That makes the ‘snuff movie’ aesthetic of (early) Guinea Pig seem even weirder, although there’s still little moments of absurdity that kind of tip Hino’s hand… anyway, my favorite manga of his is Panorama of Hell, which was translated to English in the ’90s…
The Legend of the Overfiend manga (Urotsukidoji) is a genuinely eccentric piece of work, like a filthy ’80s youth manga, although it’s definitely very tame compared to contemporary ero-guro… the anime is sort of tedious, although the animation itself is quite stylish and expensive-looking in parts…
I LOVED Tokyo Fist, although I haven’t revisited it in about a decade… but yeah, Tsukamoto’s cool.
Robert got to it first, but I was also going to mention Martyrs, which is one of those pretty unforgettable movie experiences. It’s a “torture porn” movie that stretches out the torture to an unbearable degree. It’s really well done, with the first half being exciting and compelling, to the point that you feel compelled to brave the unending second half, no matter how transgressive it is.
Noah,
I would have to rewatch Hostel to remember what I didn’t like. I remember finding the main guys really hard to sit through and the violence kind of dull. Maybe I’d change my mind on a second viewing, but I loved Cabin Fever at the time, so wasn’t predisposed to dislike Hostel.
Robert,
I’ve watched probably 30 or 40 of Miike’s films. I haven’t been following him as closely these last few years, though I loved 13 Assassins (but not Hara-Kiri, which was a wasted use of 3D). He has a lot of really good films, for sure. One of the best living directors, I’d say. It’ll be a while before he’s recognized as such. (Maybe if he referenced Douglas Sirk …)
“Hostel and even A Serbian Film felt curiously tame”
There’s something to the ugliness of Salo and the like that adds to the nastiness. The colors in A Serbian Film, for example, are too vibrant and pretty.
And since you mentioned Martyrs, I’ll push my blog entry on you.
Fair enough, Charles. I kind of felt like the fact that the protagonists were repulsive was a feature rather than a bug…but obviously mileage may vary….
Yeah, that’s what I’m doubting in my memory: I was thinking Roth sort of liked guys like that. He wanted you to sympathize with them, rather than (as I did) root for their slaughter. Risky Business never worked for me for the same reason. How could anyone like people like this? Yet, Ben Affleck has a career where he doesn’t just play acknowledged assholes.
I guess intentionality is hard to parse…but in slashers, I always feel like you’re supposed to be rooting for everybody to get slaughtered. It worked for me anyway; watching the backpackers get theirs was quite satisfying.
In a good slasher, you should at least be torn by enjoying the slaughter and wanting to see some of the victims survive. You don’t just side with the killer, or the film doesn’t really work properly, right?
Right, that’s why I said you want to see *everyone* slaughtered. That includes the killer.
Martyrs, by the way, is something like the obverse of how you read Hostel: symbolic first-worlders intentionally hurt symbolic third worlders for salvation.
Ah, gotcha.
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Thanks to Scarecrow Video in Seattle, I managed to see a good portion of Miike’s output, and I’d have to agree with Charles’ choices — particularly the brain-popping Visitor Q, which feels almost like an unofficial update on/remake of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, and remains one of my favorite films.
I think we’re going to have a piece on Audition in the not too distant future if all goes well….