Continuing his series of posts on torture porn, Curt Purcell reviews Hostel, which he likes less than I did, and Hostel Part II, which he likes more than I did. That’s about what I expected.

For the record, I thought the thriller component of the first film was enormously effective–my pulse was pounding!–in no small part because of the smart acting choices made by Jay Hernandez and, I suppose, by Eli Roth’s direction of him.

Also for the record, contra Curt’s interpretation of my Hostel Part II review, I didn’t have “apparently visceral discomfort with what [I] call ‘the aestheticized abuse of women” in the Heather Matarazzo torture scene qua the aestheticized abuse of women. Granted, that’s not necessarily my thing the way it is for much of the material Curt’s Groovy Age site focuses on, but I have no problem with it in theory any more than I have an inherent problem with the aestheticized abuse of any character in a horror movie. Moreover, I’m guessing Curt took my comment that I found the Weiner Dog Bloodbath scene to be one of the most unpleasant I’ve ever seen to mean that I didn’t “enjoy” seeing it. Enjoyment’s a tough nut to crack with horror, but again, and much more so than with Curt, “unpleasant” is more or less what I’m looking for with horror!

So if neither of those points is the key, what is? It lies in this quote from Curt:

In a movie that carves out its own signature fantasy space with a distinctive hyper-realistic style, the bloodbath scene sticks out like a sore thumb with its sumptuous, soft-lit gothicisms. It’s mentioned several times in the commentaries that this scene was actually quite disturbing to people on set during filming, and that’s less surprising to me than Sean’s reaction, because they were seeing it without all the framing, styling, cuts, editing, and post-production that so insistently reassure, “It’s only a movie.”

It was precisely because it had all that “it’s only a movie” nonsense surrounding it–and I’m thinking less of the Euro-horror sensuality in the scene itself, which is fine, and more of the splatstick stuff in the climax, which undercuts the whole film–that it bothered me so much. It’s kind of like the bit in Inside that made me turn off the movie. If I’d been watching Henry or Dahmer or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or something similarly weighty and serious in intent, I’d have stuck with it, but to violate that particular taboo in the name of a slick, glossy (if gory), credulity-stretching thriller? Thanks but no thanks. Ditto the demise of Weiner Dog. Paradoxically, it’s precisely the lack of realism that makes these sequences tougher both to watch and to justify. If i’m going to watch a nude woman get tortured to death, I want to feel like I’m eating my vegetables, not Cookie Crisps.

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