GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 2nd JULY 2007.

Hostel Thinking

Vocal board member, devoted Frightfester and all round good egg, the always interestingly opinionated Sarah Of The Dead, makes a typically cogent argument against "Hostel II" on her blog this week.

Is Eli Roth's pugnacious yet deceptively sly style able to accommodate the more thorny sexual politics of a female-centric horror picture? Should it matter and, indeed, should any dispensation be accorded these characters and those situations? Is it, after all, only a titillating, thrill-seeking horror movie?

I can't answer any of these questions (you'll see why) but the whole debate (including an hilariously didactic outburst over at David Poland's Hot Button, where his moral high ground is somewhat leveled-off by the confession that he actually saw the picture by procuring one of the roundly condemned pirate copies leaked prior to the film’s release) got me thinking.

Confession Number One: "Hostel II" is the first picture in a long while where I've had to argue with myself over whether I genuinely want to see it or not. Of course, in the past I've debated short and swift about seeing other pictures. For instance, whether or not last year's "The Fog" remake resembles 90 minutes of my life I could rather spend helping elderly ladies across the road or doing some kind of selfless act of heroic bravery to offset the karmic shift enabled by the existence of Rupert Wainwright's much derided remake. On this occasion isn't about quality, it's about quantity -- in this case, of graphic torture and depravity. I asked myself, whether this it transpired "Hostel Part II" was a masterpiece or not: do I really want to put myself through it?

“Saw III” provided no end of tedium, committed though it was to convincing us that its listless scenes of nonsensical redemptive violence were part of some grand modern horror mythology rather than the ultimate marketing stunt. (I’d rather have the ”Phantasm” series with its genuinely creative brand of loony lore than any further adventures of progressively tiresome – though commendably bloody – adolescent posturing of Jigsaw’s gang.) I also rushed to the thesaurus on more than one occasion to appropriate superlative synonyms to lavish praise upon the queasy “Wolf Creek”. It’s not like I shy away from the revolting on cue. Quite the opposite in fact, as my soon-to-be-spouse will attest, I’ve always risen to the challenge of finding that elusive piece of fiction that’s going to prove too much for my hardened sensibilities.

Had Eli Roth finally gone and done it? Has he made me, this advocate of all that is deliciously, gothically Guignol -- one who at aged 13 exploited his innocent action men as fodder for his ghastly attempts at becoming KNB's unwitting satellite workshop in deepest Surrey -- into a courageless conservative?

On reflection, it's not quite that dramatic, no. I'm still all for the hardiest the horror genre has to offer and well up for the most salacious of gruesome cinematic experiences. Yet I couldn't help but think back to my first recent brush with a new breed of aesthetically troubling "horror" that's made me examine my own attraction to the genre and now, ultimately, this new Eli Roth picture.

We now seem to be well past after those glory days when all our favourite, gore-sodden, Fangoria-heralded product seemed a gas, a hoot and a blast of harmless revelry. A couple years back, however, I saw something I really didn't get or like or discern any worth from. At all. In the slightest:

"August Underground".

I have an honest question about this (and, I guess, "Murder Set Pieces" and the breed of indie-shot problem children like them). If that question casts a shadow over the credentials of my crit, so be it. Here it is to digest anyway: does anyone over the age of 17 really want to shell out cash on a two disc version of this sort of sophomoric, juvenile, inexorably grotty and ultimately rather boring exercise in self-promotion? (Let's not kid ourselves, not matter how many credits the not-untalented Fred Vogel (of production outfit Toe Tag Productions) and crew have on low budget gigs, this is a glorified show reel with a few rag-tag member of the local metal scene helping out on fake shemp duties). I know there are some ultra-rabid cover-all-bases horror fans with bulging DVD collections who'll take a philanthropic view to these picture and their attempted dark undercurrents, or those who'll essentially acquire them for completions sake. Or there those who want a career in FX (though I'd direct them gently toward Tom Savini's splendid how-to book Grand Illusions instead). Great. I love horror from cheap and old to gloriously over the top and forward thinking. But this?

The whole X-treme horror (my term) clique puzzles me to my bloody core. It's not quite as celebrated on these shores -- where the possibility of a release seeing the light of day are as remote as John Beyer's Mediawatch sponsoring next year's Frightfest -- but certainly the global/'net horror fan community has raised its profile to that of the notorious Guinea Pig films. It puzzles me twofold: on the one hand it's not as if it compares to "In A Glass Cage" or "120 Days Of Sodom" where a semblance of genuine subtext is provided for a catalogue of "horrors". Yet on the other hand, "August Underground" doesn’t resemble a depraved work of genuine madness that should be pulled from public consumption (although in this case I can't say the BBFC-governed UK are really being denied anything of worth). It wishes it was as edgy as its preceding reputation indicates. Because the truth is that it's relentlessly dull and distressing for all the wrong reasons. It's like a snotty nosed teenager ambling into a church, screaming one of the riper passages of De Sade at a priest before calling him the Olde Englishe term for female genitalia. On some mundane level it's relatively shocking and you might be surprised by his classical diction. But it has all the meaningfulness of involuntary defecation in your shorts, not to mention a similar level of artistic merit.

Are these X-treme pictures really a challenge to the more serious, intelligent dissection on the bland, everyday terror of serial killers exemplified by "Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer"? This is surely the most rhetorical question ever. Not a hope in hell. Is the lo-fi camerawork really any more effective and real because of its intentional shoddiness ? Or is it an easy get-out for people that actually aren't particularly good photographers.

Productions like this are taboo busting and little else. It's no more audacious than the real animal slaughter in 70's Italian pictures and is sure to become as habitually irritating in years to come as the Italian exploitation industry's shameful little exercise in cruelty. It's not disturbing, just tasteless. It's not probing, just banal in its depiction of vicious acts. It's not relentless, just far too long at barely over a feature-length running time.

There's a Nine Inch Nails video that achieves everything "August Underground" and its sequel hoped to achieve. It's a terrible and disturbing short about a gentleman tortured with a blowtorch. It not only achieves a quite devastating effect with chilling ease and nonchalance, it does it in around 4 minutes.

In terms of something a little longer longer, Nacho Cerda's incredible "Aftermath" is infinitely more engrossing, moving, terrifying and enlightening about the human condition. With better gore effects too, if you wish to shallow about it. I understand "Murder Set Pieces" (also featuring Vogel's work) is of similar gross aesthetic, judging by the copious reviews.

And so I digress (at some length, but still...). What all this editorialising boils down to is that this particular instance became the first time I had an adult awareness of self-censorship based (partly) on the content of a feature film. I've never really been one for Mondo pictures or rotten.com and its ilk. Beyond a fleeting and momentary curiosity years ago (and there's some fine academic study to be had on the subject, notably Kerekes and Slater's book "Killing For Culture"), it's easy now to dismiss of them as ephemeral by-products of the car-crash syndrome that so often plays a part in our desire to see the dark and disturbing. For me, good horror (good anything actually) simply must have for want of a better term "merit" -- be it artistic, aesthetic, intellectual or otherwise. It doesn't have to be "good" (merit in that sense is totally up to the viewer) but there has to be a point. Someone very wise once said: "context is all". Never more so is this the case than with the horror film, a breed of cinema so often accused of pointless and gross indulgence. As fans, we need to prove the depths to which horror is able probe the human condition. Or at least provide a fantastically constructed/acted/directed story on which to hang a gaggle of ball-busting f/x work. "Henry" or Chuck Russell’s grotesquely fantastic remake of "The Blob", both work to the same degree or quality at either end of the "artistic" scale.

And so to my thoughts on "Hostel II".

Confession Number Two: I haven't seen “Hostel II” and, until the recent intense media debate, I was still completely unsure if I wanted to go there. I too found Rick Hoffman's astonishing scene in "Hostel" to be the high point of a genuinely chilling experience. Perhaps I just didn't want to set foot into that ethical quagmire again with two dudes from "Desperate Housewives". The implications that plot device conjured up in my brain about my fellow man were not something that I felt comfortable approaching for an extended period of time. I'm paranoid enough about the guy next to me on the platform who might turn out to be a psychopath that I don't often need to reminded of man's capacity for true depravity in those terms.

So then, has Roth succeeded where the faintly desperate purveyors of grimy DTV shock tactic sagas like "August Underground" failed? He wants -- as even the outraged David Poland agrees -- to truly disturb and for me he's actually done it through a provocative tease to a picture I haven't even seen it yet. And so I find I'm drawn to actually finding out if it lives up to its concept. If it goes beyond the charade of gore set-pieces that blight so many low-budget supposed-terror pictures.

If the debate raging on sites such as Frightfest is anything to go by, I think that the context is most definitely there and the wide-ranging interpretation of Roth's intent on both sides of the critical divide -- both pro and con – demonstrates this explicitly.

Because I haven't seen it yet I'm unable to comment on anything specific in terms of its characterisation. But reading Sarah's (remember her, from the beginning of this mammoth ramble?) reaction both in her blog and on the Frightfest boards is fascinating and brings me back round to my initial question:

Is it, after all the hyperbole, simply a titillating, thrill-seeking horror movie?

A case is there to be made that the salacious gaze of the camera at the female form is often more powerful than the gaze directed at the male one. Social codes and the generally phallocentric world we live in have decreed this to be the case for years, in most of the media we consume. Everyone from Hitchcock to Michael Powell to Brian De Palma and Dario Argento has been accused (and most surely acknowledged the inherent narrative power) of using the imperilment of women to throat-grabbing effect.

Many like Sarah have noted in Roth's picture the shallow depiction of these girls before the shit hits the fan and the blood hits the swishing blades, as if this compounds the indignity.

I ask to be allowed to play Devil's advocate for a moment and point out that in the original picture, the guys were also needy, foolish, flawed, belligerent, self-centered and less-than-reverentially sketched examples of masculinity. They were dicks. And half the subversion Roth was aiming was that you wrestled with feeling they kind of deserved it for following the little head over the big head while at the same time growing ever more concerned and horrified that these essentially harmless guys were getting carved to pieces.

It is irresponsible or simply non-discriminatory to let equally flawed female characters endure the same kind of narrative arc as the boys in the first film (and I stress again I haven't seen it so I can't make any judgement either way, nor would I want to...). Would it simply be patronising to "protect" these characters from a similar fate just because they're girls?

Or should we be more mindful of avoiding the obvious sexualisation that comes with destroying an attractive female body -- certainly a sexualisation more overt than the guy from "Dumb & Dumberer" in his pants. Though I'm sure he has his admirers.

I guess the issue though is less how characters are portrayed and more how that portrayal is consumed by the target audience – and let's be honest, where "Hostel" and overwhelmingly where an "August Underground"-style picture is concerned, that target audience is skewed toward 16-35 males, many of whom are lustful for female flesh in all facets of their lives.

There's probably a very interesting discussion to be had/thesis to be written on the differences between the exploitation of men/women in similar films and the intentions/effects they have on both the story and the spectator and whether of not it's something that needs to be addressed by filmmakers or taken into account when critiquing the pictures.

I'm probably not the one to write it, but I'm glad the idea gave me food for thought.

It's also made me adamant about seeing what Roth hath wrought this time around. I guess I've found my context.

"Broken": someone, somewhere (actually it was me on the late lamented incarnation of Creature Corner) once described Adam Mason’s previous celluloid foray, ‘Dust’ as “the ugliest film ever made by anyone, anywhere, ever.” He felt touched enough emblazon the DVD sleeve with that very quote and create a short film wherein he chastises the nefarious critic as a rather nasty fellow deserving of extended tortured punishment. You maybe saw it at one of the fests. As I've written before, I really believe Mason answered his harshest of critics with ‘Broken’. It remains a haunting repost and a literal endurance test. The apocalypse in miniature which the picture suggests seems like a throwback to all those great new wave genre films of the 1970s from filmmakers like Nic Roeg and Peter Weir who heralded from very untraditional and non-US backgrounds. Subverting our expectations (mostly the ones involving assuming it be a ripe old piece of shit), Mason and Boyes deliver a well paced domestic satire full of broken limbs, broken minds and broken families: ‘Saw’ by way of Nicholas Roeg. Against the odds, on an admirably sheened shoestring budget, Mason’s band of tenacious filmmakers have delivered admirable home grown goods for all but the most weak-stomached nihilist.

"Kaw": "Shallow Ground" played to modest enthusiasm when it debuted at a Frightfest One Day event in 2005, its jolting, genuinely exciting set-up giving way to a preposterous finale of shrieking old ladies and pointless false shocks. Now director Sheldon Wilson is back with an even more polished piece of the throwback nonsense with his breathless homage to "The Birds".

Sean Patrick Flannery plays a small town cop who slowly begins to realise that the surrounding avian population is massing against the more human locals. All manner of wildly implausible set-pieces ensue with a pleasantly grim and non-discriminatory body count and some fancy CGI effects work that present the crows as a creditable threat. It runs out of steam before the (yet again) weak epilogue and, unlike Hitchcock's masterful horror show, is saddled with a positively ludicrous and riotously preachy explanation as to what has driven these birds psychotic. There are also rather too many laughable Amish beards on display to take the whole enterprise at all seriously. While it’s no masterpiece it is, however, a terrifically paced piece of fun, extremely well constructed on a probably limited budget and ultimately a hell of a lot better than Rick Rosenthal's awful "Birds II: Lands End". Well worth a look, if only for the brooding photography and less-clunky-than-you-would-have-thought roping in of original "Birds" star Rod Taylor as the kindly town doctor.

"Fragile": I read the screenplay for this one a few years ago and remember it being rather simple, yet eerily effective piece of English gothic. All the more exciting then that such a classical ghost story (it's set in a coastal children's hospital on the verge of dereliction) is helmed by Jaume Balagueró, the Spanish filmmaker behind at least one startlingly impactful chiller in recent years, "The Nameless". His follow-up "Darkness" starring Anna Paquin languished in the troubled archives of Dimension Films eventually unleashed with little fanfare and similarly inauspicious notices.

And so he comes to this tale, not a million miles from his past excursions into terror. However the last time a Spaniard successfully handled an English language ghost story like this we were rewarded with Alejandro Amenabar’s "The Others", a modest yet deservedly acclaimed piece of mainstream horror and something that didn't shy away from its gothic origins, positively reveling in a spectacular and commendable love for Peter Medak's barn-storming "The Changeling". "Fragile" too has elements of that George C. Scott-starring masterpiece of modern terror, with a spectral child wreaking malevolent havoc in an effort to convince night-nurse Callista Flockhart to help right a deplorable wrong, leading to a resolution that's rewarding if rather familiar, but with a chilly atmosphere and style very much in effect.

Now, I'd like to see Balagueró moving less laterally within the genre, like his fellow Ramsey Campbell-adapting countryman Paco Plaza has tried successfully to do with "Romasanta" and beyond.