HOSTEL 2 and HALLOWEEN

Maybe this is too much of a cop out. Too facile a thought. But I’m thinking if a visitor from another planet wanted to see where we as humans are at this point in time, he should sit down and watch the following movies: Saw, Saw 2, Saw 3, Saw 4, Hostel, Hostel 2, House of 1000 Corpses, Devil’s Rejects and the remakes of Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Good or bad, they are an excellent means to measure a world dissolving from the inside out.

Our country is sick and the prospects are not good. The United States of America is terminally ill. Maybe it has more than six months to live, but whatever time is left it must be medicated, palliated, provided comfort care as it moans, wheezes and rattles its way to its inevitable end.

Hostel 2 (dir: Eli Roth, 2007) is bleak, wretched and avoids anything I use to associate with the term ‘entertainment’. It’s two hours of people being cruel to other people; people in control being sadistic to powerless people. If one were so inclined, one could interpret it as an allegory for the disappearance of the middle class and the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. The twist comes when a would-be victim buys her freedom and pays for the privilege of castrating her would-be killer. Those with power can and will be cruel to those who don’t. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or something like that.

Halloween (dir: Rob Zombie, 2007) is bleak, wretched and avoids anything I use to associate with the term ‘entertainment’. If nothing else, though, it stands as a reminder of just how brilliant, lean, economical and satisfying the original John Carpenter shocker was and still is. We are now supposed to swallow the idea that an ‘auteur’ like Mr. Zombie does not ‘remake’ movies, he ‘re-imagines’ them. What horseshit. While the original depicts the psycho killer Michael Meyers as an unstoppable force of evil, Mr. Zombie attempts to fill in the blanks of Meyers’ youth so that we can ‘understand’ how he came to be an unstoppable force of evil. And in understanding him, perhaps we can be more forgiving of him when he impales his victims or perhaps crushes their heads. “I know it’s awful, but he was abused as a child!” In re-imagining Michael Meyers as a victim of society, the movie actually undermines his mystique leaving the filmmaker nowhere to go but to up the carnage and slop more red colored Karo Syrup around.

I watch these movies because I’m curious about them. The original Halloween frightened me in the way I like to be frightened. Movies like the Hostel series, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre series and the newly re-imagined Halloween are presented as dares. Sitting through them without becoming physically ill buys you some macho cred on the street, or something like that. Better yet, arm chair quarterbacking, slamming the releases of wimpy PG-13 movies and hailing filmmakers who hold on to their R ratings like badges of courage has become a fanboy pastime.

But I guess I would have to counter with an offer: since ratcheting up the gore seems to be of the order, I maintain these movies don’t go far enough to that end. I think in Hostel 2, when a victim is suspended upside down and carved up with a scythe, the viewer doesn’t get to see enough. Sure we see blood spray across the face of the killer--who seems to be in a state of erotic euphoria--but we don’t actually see blade enter skin. Hence, I believe the gorehounds of the world have fallen to the old bait and switch. Who cares about the story, just pile on the gore. Don’t cutaway before a toe is snapped off, dammit, show everything!

These movies are not horrifying so much as they are horrid. They are only tests for how much the viewer can stand to watch. Like going on the tilt-a-whirl without blowing lunch.

I give Hostel 2 and Zombie’s Halloween 1 severed toe each. Use the other nine to limp your sorry ass out o’ here.