XXX Torture Porn

**Sorry for this being one big chunk of text, but you'll understand why soon. The thought of posting images to make an example just isn't worth it quite frankly.**

This started out as a simple reply to an entry at My New Plaid Pants featuring a newly released image of Heather Matarazzo gagged and hanging upside down, but it started getting way too long for a comment so I thought I'd just post something here instead. It's incredibly rushed and not at all structured well, but it's 1am so I don't care. This entry contains spoilers to the original Hostel I guess, not that there's much to spoil. People die gruesomely. Yawn. Anyway.

I've been reading some of these articles that have been popping up alot lately about violence in film and the whole "torture porn" subgenre that's emerged (as if it's only a NEW thing in horror, geez). Usually I just let the writer continue their deluded attitudes about horror films (well, the majority of horror films) and think that they're looking way too much into the issue when most people just go to horror movies for some jumps and scares and to frightened witless by something that isn't actually happening in the world as we know it.

But the more that I think about Hostel 2 the more I get kind of repulsed at the idea and the more that I really start to think Eli Roth is quite a repulsive man.

I don't generally buy the whole misogynistic angle that writers seem to take to horror movies, but then again neithr do I always buy the idea of directors that say it's all about female empowerment (well, certainly not in this day and age), but that's not the point. I do however think there's something incredibly disgusting about what Eli Roth is doing with this film. He is, in my opinion, selling the film as being about the torture and murder of young women. Pure and simple. Just like those quite revolting posters for Captivity, I think Hostel Part II is praying on the desire to watch young attractive women be murdered. As if the entire point of the movie is just to observe some sick fantasy. And considering the plot of the movie being rich people enacting murder fantasies there's certainly credence to that theory.

Eli Roth is, clearly, a man that relishes in violence but I'm not sure if it's in a particularly healthy way. There doesn't seem to be any noteworthy skill to what he decides to put on the screen. Like, he seems to be getting off on just having the ability to kill people for the sake of it - just as the Saw movies do equally reprehensively I think.

Maybe I too am just over-thinking the situation like the issue writers I typically think are being myopic, but it really does make me feel kind of sick. To be honest, in the original we actually didn't see all that much of the males tortured, but in the end he decided to have the woman kill herself and have the good looking American get away free and easy basically. In Part II it just seems to be all women, all torture, all the time. The IMDb lists a lot of females that are, probably to Roth, ripe for the taking. I may decide to watch the film on DVD and it may prove to not be this, but that doesn't make it appear to be anything more than just the classic Scream quote - "Some big-breasted girl who can't act who's always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting."

Taking a look at the poster archives for Part I and Part II also brings up another frightful element to Roth's party. The original film had posters that showed a man holding a chainsaw, another showed some tool of some sort and another involving a man with a drill placed in his mouth. Only the third one is particularly nasty (ignoring the international posters). The posters for the second film are of a particularly more grizzy variety. Ignoring the "slab of beef" I implore to you look at this one and not think it's sick. I refuse to post it on here because I just think it's detestable. I guarantee a whole swag of 15-year-old boys would see that on the Internet and go "sweet!"

I dunno, it just worries me. I didn't like the original much at all, I thought it was sort of silly and only attempted to be scary in the last 20 minutes or so (and even an untrained monkey could wrangle suspence out of that). I will usually defend gory movies. I think there's a place for them. But I do think there gets to a point when it is simply a sick director playing out his sick fantasies for people to watch under the guise of "it's just a movie."

Anyway, New Young Pony Club just came on iTunes so I'm going to finish this now because the song makes me happy and hopefully I can just get the repulsiveness of this stuff out of my mind. Until, of course, the movie opens and tonnes of young men go to the movie and cheer everytime someone gets their face blown away with a blowtorch or something. :/

[Holy shit, the conversation really drags on in the comment section. Have a gander if you're interested and leave a thought. It's incredibly interesting.]