Movies that Should Never Be Watched- Ever I just finished watching the unrated and uncut version of Quentin Tarantino's movie, Hostel. It was without a doubt, one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen.
This movie made we want to burn my eyes out with an acetylene torch, until I actually saw an eye burned out with a torch in the movie and realized that no matter how bad this movie is, having a torch taken to your eye is worse by a couple orders of magnitude, give or take a few sig figs.
This works on so many different levels.
Now the worst part of the movie, virtually unending graphic violence the entire second half, and it isn't acceptable violence. This isn't soldiers taking bullets storming the beaches of Normandy, Kate Beckinsale pumping round after round into werewolves in Underworld: Evolution (greatest movie ever! It deserves its own post that I'll never write), Brad Pitt taking one for the team from a beefy club owner in Fight Club, or even Christian Bale being totally sweet and totally psycho in American Psycho. It's put your mouth on the curb American History X violence, in a relentless Passion of the Christ style, without any kind of redemptive moral undertone. It's brutal, it's excessive, it's nauseating.
I'd like to say my threshold for violence is fairly high. I've seen way too many real stonings, beheadings, gunshot wounds and explosions courtesy of the internet to be anything less than thoroughly desensitized, and I thought it was too much. I just don't understand how somewhere making a scary movie went from demon possession and psychosis to just increasingly vivid portrayals of human agony. I don't think watching someone take a drill to a kneecap is scary, and watching someone chained to a chair squirm in their own blood and vomit while their achilles tendon is cut with a scalpel isn't horror, it's perverse.
I don't even know how to end this post. All I can say is that I'm pretty sure I'd feel better as a human at the end of watching Schindler's List with Anne Frank than I do after watching this piece of trash.
This movie made we want to burn my eyes out with an acetylene torch, until I actually saw an eye burned out with a torch in the movie and realized that no matter how bad this movie is, having a torch taken to your eye is worse by a couple orders of magnitude, give or take a few sig figs.
I'll start with the only thing right with this movie- excessive, arbitrary, completely unreasonable nudity at a level completely unmatched by anything since Bikini Cavegirl. Furthermore, this nudity is entirely at the beginning of the movie, making it completely separated from any kind of pain or misery, which is a definite plus. I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I like my boobs served with a smile, not with whips and chains and agony. If you disagree, then please refrain from saying so in my comments, or ever, because that's really not cool. The only movie I've seen worse than this one was Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, which mixed nudity and violence to the point where I couldn't play Dead or Alive 3 for at least a couple of hours.
This works on so many different levels.Now the worst part of the movie, virtually unending graphic violence the entire second half, and it isn't acceptable violence. This isn't soldiers taking bullets storming the beaches of Normandy, Kate Beckinsale pumping round after round into werewolves in Underworld: Evolution (greatest movie ever! It deserves its own post that I'll never write), Brad Pitt taking one for the team from a beefy club owner in Fight Club, or even Christian Bale being totally sweet and totally psycho in American Psycho. It's put your mouth on the curb American History X violence, in a relentless Passion of the Christ style, without any kind of redemptive moral undertone. It's brutal, it's excessive, it's nauseating.
I'd like to say my threshold for violence is fairly high. I've seen way too many real stonings, beheadings, gunshot wounds and explosions courtesy of the internet to be anything less than thoroughly desensitized, and I thought it was too much. I just don't understand how somewhere making a scary movie went from demon possession and psychosis to just increasingly vivid portrayals of human agony. I don't think watching someone take a drill to a kneecap is scary, and watching someone chained to a chair squirm in their own blood and vomit while their achilles tendon is cut with a scalpel isn't horror, it's perverse.
I don't even know how to end this post. All I can say is that I'm pretty sure I'd feel better as a human at the end of watching Schindler's List with Anne Frank than I do after watching this piece of trash.
posted by Justin at 11:59 PM 
2 Comments:
I think most of Horror, as a genre, falls into the category of "makes no sense and shouldn't be done." There's a place for suspenseful movies, and I'm not opposed to movise that legitamately scare you with suspenseful content. But so many of them today are just uncensored brutality like this - I have absolutely no desire to put that sort of content into the list of things my brain can remember and reference in troubling situations.
Sorry I'm commenting late on this. I read this review about the film and got scared. Why? Because growing up as a girl, I was taught to be wary of everyone - to scrupulously observe myself and my environment because trouble was always around the corner, waiting to torture and kill me. The images I saw of heroes escaping/overcoming trouble were almost all of men - and certainly men were never subject to being raped or forced to prostitute themselves. The mere reality of those things upsets me - why would I watch them played out on film with buckets of blood and vomit at the ready? I would hate to write off an entire narration style because the subject upsets me, but the absence of a "redemptive moral undertone" (as you so rightly put it) is what really freaks me out. If anyone thinks this movie is okay, even good, can they interact with me in the same way they did before seeing it?
I liked the review because the author seemed to see, without bringing in religion, that this kind of narrative will affect the creators. I like your question, too, how does (or perhaps "how should") this affect the viewer?
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