The Last Horror Movie (2003)
Directed by Julian Richards, Screenplay by James Handel
First of all, just go out and watch this film. Track down a copy of it, put it in your queue or whatever it is you do and then come back here.
Did you do it? Don't lie to me. Go on, now, go watch this film. Come back here when you've seen it.
Did you see it? Come on now, don't be lazy.
And don't be scared.
There.
Didn't you actually start believing that the scene in the diner at the beginning was the movie you were going to be watching?
Wasn't it just a little jarring seeing that movie get hijacked by our narrator?
Now aren't you glad I made you do that?
You're a bit weirded out? Well, I understand that. It is, after all a bit of a serious intellectual exercise.
A seriously sick intellectual exercise.
On the other hand, it was kind of funny, too, right?
But it was the kind of funny that not only made you feel a bit dirty afterward but also called you out on your conflicted feelings about violence and voyeurism. Sure, you laughed a lot, but you were also tense for a lot of that time, right? And you wondered why the killer wasn't always a killer, why you had to see him having tea with his mother and being the cool uncle to his nephews. You thought to yourself that this has to be some kind of joke, this guy had to be either a monster or not but certainly not something in between. Movies aren't supposed to work that way.
You got especially pissed off when you thought about how this film violated so many of those "rules" of screenwriting and storytelling and you didn't know if you should be angry at the film or at those con-artists in the screenwriting workshops and their hack acolytes.
You're thinking again about that scene where he doesn't show you what he's doing off camera and then accuses you of wanting to see what he was doing. You wanted to see it, didn't you? And yet you deplore violence, don't you? But once it was there it was an awful tease for him not to show you what was so clearly audible.
You're a sick and twisted person. And so am I for making you watch it. And yet, because it makes you question yourself it was worth it, wasn't it? Saw will make you feel dirty for watching it, but never call you a sick fuck for having watched it--because they want you to watch the next installment. Not this film. It calls you a sick fuck for watching and wanting to watch the killer in action and wants to cloud your mind. Admit it. You were rooting for him somewhere along the line, there, weren't you?
I mean, not when you thought he was going to kill the kid that turned out to be his nephew. And not when you thought he was going to clock the old lady like the guy in Man Bites Dog does. But somewhere along the line he became your sympathetic protagonist, and yet that is so wrong. Isn't it?
It's rare when an intellectual exercise is so damned entertaining, but this one really is.
The Last Horror Movie is one of the three best films that critique the voyeurism of violence in our culture and in many ways Julian Richards goes even further in directly confronting the audience with their complicity than Mary Harron does in American Psycho (where we can, because of the ambiguity of the source material, pass off the whole thing as a daydream) or even Man Bites Dog, which this film pays homage to on multiple occasions. The conflict here is even more than we get when we watch Dexter, because he, at least as some sort of code that we can understand whereas Max is just killing people and the more tragic the result the better for him.
The thing that Julian Richards does here with Max (Kevin Howarth) is to give us a well-rounded character who is both awful and sympathetic and who is self-aware of the part we play in watching the violence he does. Are we not entertained by all of this? And what if this was actually a snuff film taped over a crappy horror movie? Would we keep watching it? Leave it to a small British film to make us ask the hard questions.
At any rate, this is a well written, excellently directed and performed little film that you should see. It'll make you think hard the next time you sit through a film like House of Wax cheering at people being murdered.
Special Features
1. Deleted Scenes
The Nazi Woman
Max hits a woman over the head with a skillet but is disappointed by how quick it all was so he puts her in a chair and goes into her bedroom where he finds a German military hat. "Isn't it funny what people are into?" He puts it on her head and takes some makeup and draws a little Hitler moustache on her. It's sick, but funny.
The Newsagent
Max goes to a corner store to look at the newspaper headlines for the last victim. Nice juxtaposition of his pride in killing with his slight embarrassment when the clerk asks him if he's reading the paper or if he's going to buy it.
The Art Student
The extended version of the scene with the art student that the assistant (Mark Stevenson) is unable to kill. The assistant first picks up a paint brush. "What are you going to do, paint her to death? Then he tries a plastic bag but it has a hole in the top. The student is terrified by the botched torturing. It's more disturbing in its own way than the slick violence of true torture porn, which gives you no cause to be as disturbed as this.
Grandma
This is an extended version of the scene with Grandma (the Beckettian Rita Davies) where she describes taking on a burglar and pouring a hot cup of tea down the burglar's trousers. She and Max share a laugh when he recalls that the doctors said that the burglar's testicles had been "parboiled."
2. The Last Horror Movie Featurette
A typical behind the scenes independent film look.
3. Cast Auditions
It's fun to see people auditioning for this film. It certainly shows us how good the writing was.
4. Commentary
The commentary makes clear that the nods to Man Bites Dog and other films were intentional and reveal an interesting thought process behind this film. It's not about revelling in the sick and twisted but calling our fascination with that into account.
5. Director's Friend's Short: The Shoe Collector
Directed by Justin Smith, Screenplay by Emyr Glasnant & Justin Smith
First of all, this is one of the best ideas for a special feature ever. Director's Friend's Short is up there with Director's Neighbor's Home Video of Cats Playing with Yarn.
That said, this is an excellent short film about another serial killer who has a collection of shoes. Like some of the best shorts it has a zinger of a twist and it has a gemlike quality of visual control. Most of the film (until the ending) is shot at ground level so it wins a Tarantino Award for consistent shots of people's feet and shoes.
6. Coming Soon
Corn
A horror film about defective genetically modified corn that makes sheep violent. Can Jena Malone defeat the evil corn?
Gypsy 83
Goth kids on a road trip going to New York for "Night of a Thousand Stevies" a Stevie Nicks contest at a Goth club. The very idea of a thousand Stevie Nickses running around a goth club in New York makes Priscilla Queen of the Desert feel like The Dirty Dozen by contrast. Sara Rue, Karen Black and Paulo Costanzo (Evan R. Lawson from Royal Pains) are all in this film, as is the great Andersen Gabrych.
Virgin
An interesting looking little film about a girl who claims to be having the Christ child. With Elisabeth Moss, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Robin Wright Penn and Peter Gerety.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Hostel-Lite
Turistas (2006)
Directed by John Stockwell, Screenplay by Michael Ross
Turistas is the film that people think Hostel is. It's a moral fable about sex and travel and xenophobia with a thin veneer of class warfare and medicine thrown in to cover the gore fest. (Actually it's not a fest so much as a sampler plate.) Turistas takes us to the exotic countryside of Brazil. If there's one thing that I think of when I think of Brazil it's sex--the kind of sex where you wake up the next morning smelling of coconuts and missing a kidney. And Turistas delivers that kind of Brazilian sex. Turistas is an old fashioned moral fable about why it's a bad idea to leave the well-trodden path. The lesson here is that searching for some sort of "authentic" experience off the beaten trail will get you the "authentic" experience of being killed and having your organs harvested. Next time you should just stick to the tourist spots and avoid the adventurism. Of course, this point is kind of lost in the beautiful cinematography of lush tropical vistas and lovely writhing locals, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways to see those vistas than running through them while trying to escape homicidal health care workers and their mercenaries.
The organ harvesting is the post-colonial veneer of the film where the crazy doctor Zamora (Miguel Lunardi) a low-rent Bond villain, rights the wrongs done by the rich and the American and the European and the health care industry by kidnapping tourists killing them and harvesting their organs. There are several problems with his plan besides the obvious moral dubiousness of murdering people for their organs. 1. He has idiots working for him who manage to kill people in ways that destroy all their organs. (Running someone down until they jump off a cliff makes them useless for organ harvesting.) 2. His victims have probably managed to drink themselves into cirrhosis already in whatever brief time they've been in Brazil. 3. Zamora himself is clearly unhinged. He is even more unhinged than is normal for a doctor who is secretly kidnapping tourists and taking their organs for the poor.
Needless to say (and yet, here we are saying it) the semi Marxist doctor and his mercenaries are no match for attractive Americans (and Brits) who are on vacation. In statistics somewhat reminscent of WWII two Brits die and two out of three Americans survive along with an Aussie. The survivors are a brother and sister (her best friend gets harvested) and the multilingual Aussie girl who may not be a plucky American but presumably is good enough to survive. (Although, in the original draft of the script she didn't survive.)
So, is there anything worth seeing here? Well, there are some attractive people running around with little in the way of clothing including Olivia Wilde (13 from House!) and Josh Duhamel as the brother and sister Alex and Bea. (She's Bea and he's Alex.) Beau Garrett as Bea's friend Amy. (Beau Garrett did a guest spot on House a little while ago and she and Olivia Wilde are also both in Tron: Legacy.) And then there's Melissa George as Pru, the Aussie survivor. Plus there are the Brazilians Cristiani Aparecida and Lucy Ramos as Arolea. Arolea takes the less attractive of the two brits, Finn (Desmond Askew) over to a shack behind a bar on the beach and proceeds to have sex with him and then tell him the price for the aforementioned romp, which is really insult to injury given the fact that he's going to be dead soon anyway. At least the girls in Hostel gave their victims a freebie. Poor Finn gets his self-esteem destroyed, he's drugged along with the rest of the boys and girls not from Brazil and eventually murdered. There's a fantastic chase scene in underwater caves that is somewhat worth seeing on its own. And then there's poor Kiko (Agles Steib) the local who befriends the travelers, betrays them and then helps them, getting himself killed in the process. He's a goofy schmuck and along with the rockin' tunes of Marcelo D2 provides a lot of local flavor. Also providing local flavor is a bit of dancing to the tune of MC Tam's Vidro Fumê, an especially nasty tune from Brazil that would make Sir Mix-a-lot's dirty cousin Lord Nutsack blush.
The violence is, at its worst as gory as Hostel but not as sustained. The scene where Amy is cut open is probably the most disgusting set-piece here. All in all, the violence leaves me squeamish but without the interesting story and character that made the two Hostels tolerable. Some good performers here have to do a lot to make up the difference and they come close, but there's only so much they can do with what is essentially a jungle chase movie.
I think the best improvement would have been making Zamora less unhinged and more grey. Frankly, this film could have been worth the effort if if took the ethical quandary it began with and really forced us to confront some harsh decisions. As it stands, Turistas is tolerable but not really engaging, ultraviolent with a smidgen of thought and some nice visuals. Turistas may not leave you with a case of la turista, but it's not exactly appetizing either.
Special Features
1. The unrated version includes both the unrated version and the theatrical cut in case you like your torture films less filling.
2. The Bloody Truth: The Special Make-Up Effects of Turistas
Disgusting and fascinating at the same time. The kind of effort put into making the surgery scene at the end look so real is frightening.
3. Commentary with Director John Stockwell and Producer Kent Kubena
If you're interested in how to make a film in Brazil, then this is an interesting bit of commentary.
4. Deleted Scenes
I Have A Shit
Kiko: I have a shit that tells me what to do...but the shit is very old and very stupid.
He means to say "sheet" as in a sheet of phrases in English, but it is so much funnier to go on in this vein for a minute.
Bar Fight
It's more like Bar Altercation. Alex steps up to defend Amy from a guy who gets to grindy and then pulls a gun. It makes the whole bar scene a bit too dangerous too soon.
Morning After
A great scene where the cabana bar owner shows up in the morning and says they owe him a lot of money. Things are bad enough for them but to have the mundane problem of having to pay for a mess is almost funny compared to what else is in store for them.
Lost
They're lost in the jungle and Kiko climbs a tree to try to figure out where they are while the guys debate whether or not they can get back to where they started from if they have to kill Kiko. I think they should have just killed Kiko and set up their own little Gilligan's Island village in the jungle.
The Waterfall
An extended scene in the fabulous waterfall location. It raises the question of whether it's worth transplanting organs from someone hopped up on several different drugs.
Shower Trip
People high on E sitting under an outdoor shower.
Girl Talk
A tender scene with Amy freaking out while being comforted by Bea. This scene raises all kinds of unanswered questions about Bea and Amy's relationship.
Alex On Patrol
Alex walking around on nightwatch with a serious case of insomnia.
On The Prowl
At Zamora's "facility" a guard gets busy with the cook.
Kiko's Speech
Kiko delivers a long speech explaining his reasons for being involved with this group and defending his choices. And then he gets shot. Might have been even more fun if he had been eaten by one of those sharks from Deep Blue Sea.
Alternate Ending
In the Alternate Ending Alex smashes Zamora's head in with a rock in the cave.
5. Trailers
The Hills Have Eyes 2 (aka The Hills Still Have Eyes) This is a pretty good teaser. I don't want to see the film, but it's a good trailer.
Wrong Turn 2 (aka This Turn Is Still Wrong)
Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (aka How Come You're Not Funny Anymore? 2: The Rise of Awful Comedy)
Path Finder (I was pretty sure Pathfinder was all one word, but hey it's Fox's movie...)
Directed by John Stockwell, Screenplay by Michael Ross
Turistas is the film that people think Hostel is. It's a moral fable about sex and travel and xenophobia with a thin veneer of class warfare and medicine thrown in to cover the gore fest. (Actually it's not a fest so much as a sampler plate.) Turistas takes us to the exotic countryside of Brazil. If there's one thing that I think of when I think of Brazil it's sex--the kind of sex where you wake up the next morning smelling of coconuts and missing a kidney. And Turistas delivers that kind of Brazilian sex. Turistas is an old fashioned moral fable about why it's a bad idea to leave the well-trodden path. The lesson here is that searching for some sort of "authentic" experience off the beaten trail will get you the "authentic" experience of being killed and having your organs harvested. Next time you should just stick to the tourist spots and avoid the adventurism. Of course, this point is kind of lost in the beautiful cinematography of lush tropical vistas and lovely writhing locals, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways to see those vistas than running through them while trying to escape homicidal health care workers and their mercenaries.
The organ harvesting is the post-colonial veneer of the film where the crazy doctor Zamora (Miguel Lunardi) a low-rent Bond villain, rights the wrongs done by the rich and the American and the European and the health care industry by kidnapping tourists killing them and harvesting their organs. There are several problems with his plan besides the obvious moral dubiousness of murdering people for their organs. 1. He has idiots working for him who manage to kill people in ways that destroy all their organs. (Running someone down until they jump off a cliff makes them useless for organ harvesting.) 2. His victims have probably managed to drink themselves into cirrhosis already in whatever brief time they've been in Brazil. 3. Zamora himself is clearly unhinged. He is even more unhinged than is normal for a doctor who is secretly kidnapping tourists and taking their organs for the poor.
Needless to say (and yet, here we are saying it) the semi Marxist doctor and his mercenaries are no match for attractive Americans (and Brits) who are on vacation. In statistics somewhat reminscent of WWII two Brits die and two out of three Americans survive along with an Aussie. The survivors are a brother and sister (her best friend gets harvested) and the multilingual Aussie girl who may not be a plucky American but presumably is good enough to survive. (Although, in the original draft of the script she didn't survive.)
So, is there anything worth seeing here? Well, there are some attractive people running around with little in the way of clothing including Olivia Wilde (13 from House!) and Josh Duhamel as the brother and sister Alex and Bea. (She's Bea and he's Alex.) Beau Garrett as Bea's friend Amy. (Beau Garrett did a guest spot on House a little while ago and she and Olivia Wilde are also both in Tron: Legacy.) And then there's Melissa George as Pru, the Aussie survivor. Plus there are the Brazilians Cristiani Aparecida and Lucy Ramos as Arolea. Arolea takes the less attractive of the two brits, Finn (Desmond Askew) over to a shack behind a bar on the beach and proceeds to have sex with him and then tell him the price for the aforementioned romp, which is really insult to injury given the fact that he's going to be dead soon anyway. At least the girls in Hostel gave their victims a freebie. Poor Finn gets his self-esteem destroyed, he's drugged along with the rest of the boys and girls not from Brazil and eventually murdered. There's a fantastic chase scene in underwater caves that is somewhat worth seeing on its own. And then there's poor Kiko (Agles Steib) the local who befriends the travelers, betrays them and then helps them, getting himself killed in the process. He's a goofy schmuck and along with the rockin' tunes of Marcelo D2 provides a lot of local flavor. Also providing local flavor is a bit of dancing to the tune of MC Tam's Vidro Fumê, an especially nasty tune from Brazil that would make Sir Mix-a-lot's dirty cousin Lord Nutsack blush.
The violence is, at its worst as gory as Hostel but not as sustained. The scene where Amy is cut open is probably the most disgusting set-piece here. All in all, the violence leaves me squeamish but without the interesting story and character that made the two Hostels tolerable. Some good performers here have to do a lot to make up the difference and they come close, but there's only so much they can do with what is essentially a jungle chase movie.
I think the best improvement would have been making Zamora less unhinged and more grey. Frankly, this film could have been worth the effort if if took the ethical quandary it began with and really forced us to confront some harsh decisions. As it stands, Turistas is tolerable but not really engaging, ultraviolent with a smidgen of thought and some nice visuals. Turistas may not leave you with a case of la turista, but it's not exactly appetizing either.
Special Features
1. The unrated version includes both the unrated version and the theatrical cut in case you like your torture films less filling.
2. The Bloody Truth: The Special Make-Up Effects of Turistas
Disgusting and fascinating at the same time. The kind of effort put into making the surgery scene at the end look so real is frightening.
3. Commentary with Director John Stockwell and Producer Kent Kubena
If you're interested in how to make a film in Brazil, then this is an interesting bit of commentary.
4. Deleted Scenes
I Have A Shit
Kiko: I have a shit that tells me what to do...but the shit is very old and very stupid.
He means to say "sheet" as in a sheet of phrases in English, but it is so much funnier to go on in this vein for a minute.
Bar Fight
It's more like Bar Altercation. Alex steps up to defend Amy from a guy who gets to grindy and then pulls a gun. It makes the whole bar scene a bit too dangerous too soon.
Morning After
A great scene where the cabana bar owner shows up in the morning and says they owe him a lot of money. Things are bad enough for them but to have the mundane problem of having to pay for a mess is almost funny compared to what else is in store for them.
Lost
They're lost in the jungle and Kiko climbs a tree to try to figure out where they are while the guys debate whether or not they can get back to where they started from if they have to kill Kiko. I think they should have just killed Kiko and set up their own little Gilligan's Island village in the jungle.
The Waterfall
An extended scene in the fabulous waterfall location. It raises the question of whether it's worth transplanting organs from someone hopped up on several different drugs.
Shower Trip
People high on E sitting under an outdoor shower.
Girl Talk
A tender scene with Amy freaking out while being comforted by Bea. This scene raises all kinds of unanswered questions about Bea and Amy's relationship.
Alex On Patrol
Alex walking around on nightwatch with a serious case of insomnia.
On The Prowl
At Zamora's "facility" a guard gets busy with the cook.
Kiko's Speech
Kiko delivers a long speech explaining his reasons for being involved with this group and defending his choices. And then he gets shot. Might have been even more fun if he had been eaten by one of those sharks from Deep Blue Sea.
Alternate Ending
In the Alternate Ending Alex smashes Zamora's head in with a rock in the cave.
5. Trailers
The Hills Have Eyes 2 (aka The Hills Still Have Eyes) This is a pretty good teaser. I don't want to see the film, but it's a good trailer.
Wrong Turn 2 (aka This Turn Is Still Wrong)
Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (aka How Come You're Not Funny Anymore? 2: The Rise of Awful Comedy)
Path Finder (I was pretty sure Pathfinder was all one word, but hey it's Fox's movie...)
Monday, September 6, 2010
Return of the Son of Black Christmas
Black Christmas (Unrated) (2006)
Directed by Glen Morgan, Screenplay by Glen Morgan
It's like someone looked at the things that made Black Christmas unique and decided to ditch them and make the same movie that everyone else was making only with two killers, some incest and a lot of eating of eyeballs. In the original film the killer identifies himself as Billy and he calls out to someone he calls Agnes. This film starts with Billy escaping a mental institution around Christmas to go back to his home (which is now a sorority house) where he will have a reunion with his she-male sister Agnes.
Now, at no time is Agnes identified as being ambiguously gendered it's just that the adult Agnes is played by a man in drag whereas the flashbacks to younger Agnes she is a not particularly mannish girl. So, either she grew up real ugly or she had some sort of other issues along the way. (Other than having an eye punched out by her brother Billy because he was jealous of her.) Also, Billy has a medical condition that makes his skin yellow, but not nearly as yellow as Nick Stahl in Sin City so it's not even that interesting as a condition goes. As long as we're on the flashback backstory, Billy's mother and father hate each other, so Billy's mother and her lover kill Billy's father and bury him in the basement and then they lock Billy up in the attic so he can't tell anyone and so they don't have to see his yellow skin. Billy's mother tries to get pregnant with her lover, but the guy can't make it happen so she heads up into the attic and rapes her son, the aforementioned yellow-skinned Billy. Hence, Agnes. So you might say that Agnes, being a product of incest would obviously turn out to be screwed up, but it takes 8 years for Billy to bust out of the attic (seriously? 8 years?) and rip out Agnes's eye and kill his mother and her lover and then bake Christmas cookies with his mother's flesh. (Note to Billy: They're not really cookies, so much as cookie-shaped meat-treats.) So, the cops take Billy and imprison him in the mental asylum, which he escapes after killing a man in a Santa Claus outfit and escaping dressed as crazy Santa on Christmas Eve 2006.
Billy's old house is the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house, or as we will call it from now on, the Sorority House of Atreus. The preceding description of the backstory is a good example of what happens when you decide to kill all the mystery and make the unknowable known. Granted, it does take a great number of flashbacks layered into the film to get the whole shabby tale of murder, adultery, incest and eye-eating, but did we need to know all of that? Did we need the whole of Greek tragedy layered into the backstory of a psycho killer in a sorority house? Wouldn't it be more interesting if Billy was just some guy who works at Whataburger who goes on a killing spree? Isn't it better to leave some damn thing to the imagination? Well, if you believe the answer to that last question is no, then Black X-mas is your film.
I'm not saying that this was a terrible film at all. It has its moments. But it is a disappointing film, especially when seen right after the original Black Christmas.
Black X-mas is horrifying and disgusting and suspenseful but it isn't really scary and it sure isn't bleak like the original film. Pretty much what you get here is double the killers and double the sorority girls getting killed. Now, while the former means you get a she-male and a slightly jaundiced nutwagon, the latter means you get an all-star cast whose actual acting talents are made better use of by an episode of House than in the 95 minutes of this film. (I'm looking at you, Michelle Trachtenberg.)
The sorority girls are killed off at a regular pace in rather unceremonious (if gruesome) ways. The first victim is poor Clair Crosby (Leela Savasta who would go on to be in BSG) who gets stabbed in the eye with a fountain pen. Next to die is Megan Helms (Jessica Harmon, who like Leela Savasta would go on to have a recurring role on BSG) who gets a bag on the head and her eyes (always with the eyes) pulled out. Now, Megan had a sex tape of herself and her ex-boyfriend Kyle (Oliver Hudson). Kyle's current girlfriend is Kelli. (Katie Cassidy). (The only way this could be better would be if Kyle and Kelli turned out to be brother and sister and that Kyle is actually a she-male.) Here's a spoiler for you: Kelli survives, presumably as a consolation for losing her boyfriend and her entire sorority in the worst Christmas ever. I should mention that one of the draws of this film is that this is a much better stocked sorority than the one in the original Black Christmas, which was kind of sparse. Here we have Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the aforementioned Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert (who deserves so much better than being killed with a rake), and Crystal Lowe, who at least gets slightly further down the line than she did when she was prematurely killed by Lorenzo Lamas in Blood Angels. Lowe does the obligatory shower scene but is only killed later in her bed with a crystal unicorn. The sorority girls (who all die) are watched over by Ms. Mac who is played by Andrea Martin (back for another Black Christmas). Martin's Mac is a little more with-it than the Mac in the older film, but she is nonetheless just as dead. Clair's sister Leigh (Kristen Cloke) shows up and makes it all the way to the inevitable hospital scene but that's where Agnes shows up and snaps her neck. Kelli, though, manages to fry Agnes and then push Billy into falling and impaling himself on a Christmas tree.
So, what to make of this? Well, if you can survive two psychos then you're still living in a more hopeful world than in the original Black Christmas. I really don't want to pile on Glen Morgan because I was a big fan of his short-lived show Space: Above and Beyond, but I have to wonder what the point of this sorority slaughter with the overly determined backstory really is. I'm not saying that this is a poorly made horror film, because it's actually pretty slickly put together with good acting, decent suspense and obscenely grotesque special effects violence. I know I probably wouldn't have appreciated a shot for shot remake of the original Black Christmas, so what's the problem with slapping a more conventional ending to this film? I think it once again says a lot about a perceived unwillingness of our present day culture to deal with the harsh possibilities out there. A film like Black X-Mas is an exercise in optimism--whatever mysteries are lurking in the sorority house of the world, we can learn them and know them--and whatever psycho killer is out there with his she-male inbred sister/daughter stalking us and threatening to eat our eyes out we can survive it if we are strong enough and keep our wits about us and if we have enough friends to provide cannon fodder for the slashers. So maybe this remake is a perfect bookend for anyone who was genuinely freaked out by the dark ending of the original. The price you pay for the comfort of knowing that even Billy and Agnes can be survived is a bunch of gruesome special effects and there's something about that which while disconcerting and disgusting is never quite that disturbing once you've been behind the scenes to see how it's done.
At any rate, this film does retain some degree of thoughtfulness compared to other films in the subgenre and it does delve into the idea of families and relationships and it has a really great ensemble. The parts that are least interesting are the places that veer into the classic slasher pattern which leaves one survivor as our protagonist.
Special Features
1. What Have You Done?
Bob Clark is shown on the set of the remake.
"What was said to us is that you either make horror films or porno films..." Bob Clark
You may not have noticed the leg lamp from A Christmas Story in the sorority house before but it's shown here.
Glen Morgan noted the Midnight Q&A of the original film and how he was surprised that Bob Clark didn't have the backstory of Billy and Agnes thought out. Clark, though, says that he did have a backstory, but that he has no intention of revealing it.
For a promotional video this is pretty revealing and as with other horror films I have to say that getting to see the behind-the-scenes footage is always reassuring.
2. May All Your Christmases Be Black: A Filmmaker's Journey
Glen Morgan's insight into slasher films, horror and filmmaking in general. Worth seeing this, especially since everyone involved has some cynical things to say about audiences and Hollywood films, and I have to say that I came out of this respecting Glen Morgan and the folks making this film. And at least we get the reason why Agnes is played by a guy.
3. Deleted Scenes
1. Someone In The Attic
I must admit that this scene on its own makes for a pretty creepy little short film.
2. Christmas Ringtones
"Doesn't your phone do anything?"
"It validates me."
Alright, I kind of wish this scene had been in the film. It gives the girls some more character. I would have traded this bit in exchange for the subsequent change of pacing.
3. Gift Exchange
Lacey Chabert's secret Santa gave her a giant dildo that is about 1/3 the size of her body. Now that's the Christmas spirit!
4. The Girls Discuss Kyle and Eve
This bit might have been nice in terms of clarifying suspicions. I swear, some filmmakers are so convinced that pacing is king that they forget that a fast paced story that doesn't tell a story isn't much of a story at all.
5. Extended Version--Phone Call From Dana
Another bit that helps explain what's going on. I have to say, if you're going to make a film that is so bent on explaining everything every step of the way I don't see why you would cut any of this stuff out.
6. International Version--Melissa Killed In the Hallway
You'd think the "unrated" version of any film would be the most disgusting one, but in this case I'll have to give the points to this scene. Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg) is caught by Agnes, who throws a plastic bag on her head, hurls her to the ground and then pops out her eyeball through the bag and eats it and then drags her out of the scene using her empty eye sockets as finger-holes. While the scene in the film itself is more visibly violent, this one is much more gruesome and vicious and the fact that this is what the International audience got is at least somewhat reassuring as to how screwed up Americans are in relation to the rest of the world.
7. Alternate Version--Lauren's Death
This is a slower stalking scene compared to the shock scene in the film. It's another scene that would do well as a short film.
4. Alternate Endings
Alternate endings bug the crap out of me because while it does imply a certain fluidity of storytelling possibilities it also indicates the notion that you don't really have a coherent story and are holding out options in case a room full of slackers and old people tell you they didn't like how your story ended and a conference table populated by cowards in suits is afraid that the people who saw your movie for free won't pay to see it again. "Hamlet has been through so much. Can't he find an antidote to the poison and survive?" The average test audience should be shown Cocoon: The Return and given a candy bar and then walked into an open pit and shot.
Alternate Ending #1
By far the creepiest ending, since it leaves Leigh and Kelli alive but getting a phone call from Kyle's cellphone which was last seen in the attic where Kyle died.
Sure, it's a continuing threat, but at least it's not immediate--which makes it almost as unsettling as the end of the original.
Alternate Ending #2
Agnes kills Leigh in Kelli's bed. Kelli kills Agnes with the defibrillator and her parents take her home. End of story. No return of the burned Billy to get impaled on the Christmas tree. A solid ending, though why not include a Billy resolution while you're at it.
Alternate Ending #3
Kelli is wheeled in to see Billy flatlining. Reassured, she and her family leave the hospital. The guy from the morgue shows up to take Billy's body away but it's already gone. We see his eye peeking from behind a vent in the wall.
For some reason these endings that leave Billy alive at the end, while continuing the threat actually seem less fitting for this story than the one that made the final cut. It seems to me that if you're going to include such an elaborate and backstory for Billy and Agnes then making them nigh invulnerable to fire and other forms of death is just a supernatural cheat for a story that is certainly not supernatural either here or in its original version.
5. Previews
1. The Truth An anti-tobacco ad with a bunch of people lying down on a street outside an office building as a visual indictment of the fact that "Tobacco Kills 1200 people a day." The problem with this is that it kills people who smoke. At this point, I can't blame corporations anymore for making a deadly product that everyone knows is a deadly product but that they love to use. If crystal meth was made by corporations and marketed with a cartoon camel I think at this point I would feel the same way. Sure, the corporations are evil for wanting to get people hooked so they can make a fast buck, but people are weak for getting hooked on something that does that kind of damage. The truth is that all corporations are designed to hustle money from people for as little as they can give back. (New iPhone 37.5 will be coming out shortly.)
2. Grindhouse
At least now I can remember why I was excited to see Grindhouse.
3. Vince Vaughan's Wild West Comedy Show
"This spring Vince Vaughan is coming to your town." God, I hope not.
4. Hannibal Rising
Is there nothing left that hasn't had a prequel made? Hannibal Rising, Hannibal Falling, Hannibal Hears a Hoo, Hannibal can suck it.
5. Pulse
Kristen Bell sees dead people in her computer and I just don't care.
6. Feast
A creature feature with Henry Rollins. It looks disgustingly hilarious.
Directed by Glen Morgan, Screenplay by Glen Morgan
It's like someone looked at the things that made Black Christmas unique and decided to ditch them and make the same movie that everyone else was making only with two killers, some incest and a lot of eating of eyeballs. In the original film the killer identifies himself as Billy and he calls out to someone he calls Agnes. This film starts with Billy escaping a mental institution around Christmas to go back to his home (which is now a sorority house) where he will have a reunion with his she-male sister Agnes.
Now, at no time is Agnes identified as being ambiguously gendered it's just that the adult Agnes is played by a man in drag whereas the flashbacks to younger Agnes she is a not particularly mannish girl. So, either she grew up real ugly or she had some sort of other issues along the way. (Other than having an eye punched out by her brother Billy because he was jealous of her.) Also, Billy has a medical condition that makes his skin yellow, but not nearly as yellow as Nick Stahl in Sin City so it's not even that interesting as a condition goes. As long as we're on the flashback backstory, Billy's mother and father hate each other, so Billy's mother and her lover kill Billy's father and bury him in the basement and then they lock Billy up in the attic so he can't tell anyone and so they don't have to see his yellow skin. Billy's mother tries to get pregnant with her lover, but the guy can't make it happen so she heads up into the attic and rapes her son, the aforementioned yellow-skinned Billy. Hence, Agnes. So you might say that Agnes, being a product of incest would obviously turn out to be screwed up, but it takes 8 years for Billy to bust out of the attic (seriously? 8 years?) and rip out Agnes's eye and kill his mother and her lover and then bake Christmas cookies with his mother's flesh. (Note to Billy: They're not really cookies, so much as cookie-shaped meat-treats.) So, the cops take Billy and imprison him in the mental asylum, which he escapes after killing a man in a Santa Claus outfit and escaping dressed as crazy Santa on Christmas Eve 2006.
Billy's old house is the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority house, or as we will call it from now on, the Sorority House of Atreus. The preceding description of the backstory is a good example of what happens when you decide to kill all the mystery and make the unknowable known. Granted, it does take a great number of flashbacks layered into the film to get the whole shabby tale of murder, adultery, incest and eye-eating, but did we need to know all of that? Did we need the whole of Greek tragedy layered into the backstory of a psycho killer in a sorority house? Wouldn't it be more interesting if Billy was just some guy who works at Whataburger who goes on a killing spree? Isn't it better to leave some damn thing to the imagination? Well, if you believe the answer to that last question is no, then Black X-mas is your film.
I'm not saying that this was a terrible film at all. It has its moments. But it is a disappointing film, especially when seen right after the original Black Christmas.
Black X-mas is horrifying and disgusting and suspenseful but it isn't really scary and it sure isn't bleak like the original film. Pretty much what you get here is double the killers and double the sorority girls getting killed. Now, while the former means you get a she-male and a slightly jaundiced nutwagon, the latter means you get an all-star cast whose actual acting talents are made better use of by an episode of House than in the 95 minutes of this film. (I'm looking at you, Michelle Trachtenberg.)
The sorority girls are killed off at a regular pace in rather unceremonious (if gruesome) ways. The first victim is poor Clair Crosby (Leela Savasta who would go on to be in BSG) who gets stabbed in the eye with a fountain pen. Next to die is Megan Helms (Jessica Harmon, who like Leela Savasta would go on to have a recurring role on BSG) who gets a bag on the head and her eyes (always with the eyes) pulled out. Now, Megan had a sex tape of herself and her ex-boyfriend Kyle (Oliver Hudson). Kyle's current girlfriend is Kelli. (Katie Cassidy). (The only way this could be better would be if Kyle and Kelli turned out to be brother and sister and that Kyle is actually a she-male.) Here's a spoiler for you: Kelli survives, presumably as a consolation for losing her boyfriend and her entire sorority in the worst Christmas ever. I should mention that one of the draws of this film is that this is a much better stocked sorority than the one in the original Black Christmas, which was kind of sparse. Here we have Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the aforementioned Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert (who deserves so much better than being killed with a rake), and Crystal Lowe, who at least gets slightly further down the line than she did when she was prematurely killed by Lorenzo Lamas in Blood Angels. Lowe does the obligatory shower scene but is only killed later in her bed with a crystal unicorn. The sorority girls (who all die) are watched over by Ms. Mac who is played by Andrea Martin (back for another Black Christmas). Martin's Mac is a little more with-it than the Mac in the older film, but she is nonetheless just as dead. Clair's sister Leigh (Kristen Cloke) shows up and makes it all the way to the inevitable hospital scene but that's where Agnes shows up and snaps her neck. Kelli, though, manages to fry Agnes and then push Billy into falling and impaling himself on a Christmas tree.
So, what to make of this? Well, if you can survive two psychos then you're still living in a more hopeful world than in the original Black Christmas. I really don't want to pile on Glen Morgan because I was a big fan of his short-lived show Space: Above and Beyond, but I have to wonder what the point of this sorority slaughter with the overly determined backstory really is. I'm not saying that this is a poorly made horror film, because it's actually pretty slickly put together with good acting, decent suspense and obscenely grotesque special effects violence. I know I probably wouldn't have appreciated a shot for shot remake of the original Black Christmas, so what's the problem with slapping a more conventional ending to this film? I think it once again says a lot about a perceived unwillingness of our present day culture to deal with the harsh possibilities out there. A film like Black X-Mas is an exercise in optimism--whatever mysteries are lurking in the sorority house of the world, we can learn them and know them--and whatever psycho killer is out there with his she-male inbred sister/daughter stalking us and threatening to eat our eyes out we can survive it if we are strong enough and keep our wits about us and if we have enough friends to provide cannon fodder for the slashers. So maybe this remake is a perfect bookend for anyone who was genuinely freaked out by the dark ending of the original. The price you pay for the comfort of knowing that even Billy and Agnes can be survived is a bunch of gruesome special effects and there's something about that which while disconcerting and disgusting is never quite that disturbing once you've been behind the scenes to see how it's done.
At any rate, this film does retain some degree of thoughtfulness compared to other films in the subgenre and it does delve into the idea of families and relationships and it has a really great ensemble. The parts that are least interesting are the places that veer into the classic slasher pattern which leaves one survivor as our protagonist.
Special Features
1. What Have You Done?
Bob Clark is shown on the set of the remake.
"What was said to us is that you either make horror films or porno films..." Bob Clark
You may not have noticed the leg lamp from A Christmas Story in the sorority house before but it's shown here.
Glen Morgan noted the Midnight Q&A of the original film and how he was surprised that Bob Clark didn't have the backstory of Billy and Agnes thought out. Clark, though, says that he did have a backstory, but that he has no intention of revealing it.
For a promotional video this is pretty revealing and as with other horror films I have to say that getting to see the behind-the-scenes footage is always reassuring.
2. May All Your Christmases Be Black: A Filmmaker's Journey
Glen Morgan's insight into slasher films, horror and filmmaking in general. Worth seeing this, especially since everyone involved has some cynical things to say about audiences and Hollywood films, and I have to say that I came out of this respecting Glen Morgan and the folks making this film. And at least we get the reason why Agnes is played by a guy.
3. Deleted Scenes
1. Someone In The Attic
I must admit that this scene on its own makes for a pretty creepy little short film.
2. Christmas Ringtones
"Doesn't your phone do anything?"
"It validates me."
Alright, I kind of wish this scene had been in the film. It gives the girls some more character. I would have traded this bit in exchange for the subsequent change of pacing.
3. Gift Exchange
Lacey Chabert's secret Santa gave her a giant dildo that is about 1/3 the size of her body. Now that's the Christmas spirit!
4. The Girls Discuss Kyle and Eve
This bit might have been nice in terms of clarifying suspicions. I swear, some filmmakers are so convinced that pacing is king that they forget that a fast paced story that doesn't tell a story isn't much of a story at all.
5. Extended Version--Phone Call From Dana
Another bit that helps explain what's going on. I have to say, if you're going to make a film that is so bent on explaining everything every step of the way I don't see why you would cut any of this stuff out.
6. International Version--Melissa Killed In the Hallway
You'd think the "unrated" version of any film would be the most disgusting one, but in this case I'll have to give the points to this scene. Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg) is caught by Agnes, who throws a plastic bag on her head, hurls her to the ground and then pops out her eyeball through the bag and eats it and then drags her out of the scene using her empty eye sockets as finger-holes. While the scene in the film itself is more visibly violent, this one is much more gruesome and vicious and the fact that this is what the International audience got is at least somewhat reassuring as to how screwed up Americans are in relation to the rest of the world.
7. Alternate Version--Lauren's Death
This is a slower stalking scene compared to the shock scene in the film. It's another scene that would do well as a short film.
4. Alternate Endings
Alternate endings bug the crap out of me because while it does imply a certain fluidity of storytelling possibilities it also indicates the notion that you don't really have a coherent story and are holding out options in case a room full of slackers and old people tell you they didn't like how your story ended and a conference table populated by cowards in suits is afraid that the people who saw your movie for free won't pay to see it again. "Hamlet has been through so much. Can't he find an antidote to the poison and survive?" The average test audience should be shown Cocoon: The Return and given a candy bar and then walked into an open pit and shot.
Alternate Ending #1
By far the creepiest ending, since it leaves Leigh and Kelli alive but getting a phone call from Kyle's cellphone which was last seen in the attic where Kyle died.
Sure, it's a continuing threat, but at least it's not immediate--which makes it almost as unsettling as the end of the original.
Alternate Ending #2
Agnes kills Leigh in Kelli's bed. Kelli kills Agnes with the defibrillator and her parents take her home. End of story. No return of the burned Billy to get impaled on the Christmas tree. A solid ending, though why not include a Billy resolution while you're at it.
Alternate Ending #3
Kelli is wheeled in to see Billy flatlining. Reassured, she and her family leave the hospital. The guy from the morgue shows up to take Billy's body away but it's already gone. We see his eye peeking from behind a vent in the wall.
For some reason these endings that leave Billy alive at the end, while continuing the threat actually seem less fitting for this story than the one that made the final cut. It seems to me that if you're going to include such an elaborate and backstory for Billy and Agnes then making them nigh invulnerable to fire and other forms of death is just a supernatural cheat for a story that is certainly not supernatural either here or in its original version.
5. Previews
1. The Truth An anti-tobacco ad with a bunch of people lying down on a street outside an office building as a visual indictment of the fact that "Tobacco Kills 1200 people a day." The problem with this is that it kills people who smoke. At this point, I can't blame corporations anymore for making a deadly product that everyone knows is a deadly product but that they love to use. If crystal meth was made by corporations and marketed with a cartoon camel I think at this point I would feel the same way. Sure, the corporations are evil for wanting to get people hooked so they can make a fast buck, but people are weak for getting hooked on something that does that kind of damage. The truth is that all corporations are designed to hustle money from people for as little as they can give back. (New iPhone 37.5 will be coming out shortly.)
2. Grindhouse
At least now I can remember why I was excited to see Grindhouse.
3. Vince Vaughan's Wild West Comedy Show
"This spring Vince Vaughan is coming to your town." God, I hope not.
4. Hannibal Rising
Is there nothing left that hasn't had a prequel made? Hannibal Rising, Hannibal Falling, Hannibal Hears a Hoo, Hannibal can suck it.
5. Pulse
Kristen Bell sees dead people in her computer and I just don't care.
6. Feast
A creature feature with Henry Rollins. It looks disgustingly hilarious.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Bleak Christmas
Black Christmas (1974)
Directed by Bob Clark, Screenplay by Roy Moore
Black Christmas is one of the bleakest films ever. It's bleak even for a horror movie. It's bleaker than Bleak House by a long shot. There's something appropriately unsettling about a horror film where all you see is a pair of hands from the killer's perspective and not only is there no comeuppance for the murderer but there's not even the satisfaction of learning anything about the killer. Isn't that what really scares people? The closest glimpse we get of the killer is a quick shot of him in a closet as he's strangling one of his victims and his voice in the multiple obscene phone calls he makes to the sorority house he is stalking. This is the only sure indication of the killer's gender. At some point in the calls he says his name is Billy and later he speaks as if he's talking to someone named Agnes. The phone calls are barely intelligible. An analogously bleak movie would be if you took Jaws and shot most of it from the perspective of the shark and let the shark get away without showing the audience so much as a fin. That's how bleak Black Christmas is.
Of course, it's a movie from the '70s, so there's almost an expectation that it will be a bleaker film than anything we can get today. A contemporary horror film will be more graphic, more disgusting, more visually violent than something like Black Christmas, but for the most part they can't compare with the genuine unsettling nature of the unseen and the unknown and yet (because this film does not have anything supernatural in it) not unbelievable or impossible.
So what's the big deal about Black Christmas? Why did anyone feel the need to remake it? Look at the date on it. It precedes Halloween, Friday the 13th and all the other slasher classics and it came out the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is the bleak maternal grandfather of the sorority house massacre sub genre (though there were other sorority house massacre films that preceded Black Christmas). If you've grown tired of the old cliche of the phone calls that are traced to someone calling from inside the house of the victim then you should know that Black Christmas is the film that first used that old gag. In fact, the scenes in the telephone exchange provide an interesting historical record of telecommunications systems and their physical operation.
The thing that is unsettling about a film like Black Christmas is that it doesn't really give you the chance to shake off the horror at the end. Even in films that pop back with the shocker ending you are allowed some degree of understanding of the reasons (albeit usually crazy) for the killings. You're given some psychic solace of knowledge about the perpetrator of the preceding violence. But in this film we don't really get much of anything and what's more, the killer is still on the loose in the house at the end of the film while the police are standing guard outside. The symbolism is obvious: the danger is within and the system only knows how to guard from danger from without, even when the spate of killings was obviously perpetrated from within the house and the police haven't made a thorough enough search to notice the dead girl in the attic sitting right in front of the window. I personally found that to be the most unsettling thing of all: that the authorities are still searching for the first victim when her body is sitting wrapped in a plastic curtain right in front of the attic window visible to the street below if you just look hard enough. It's as if the real horror you take away from this film is that the world is full of un-thorough and incompetent guardians who are of no use when a psycho decides to go on a rampage. All of this makes this film a purer type of horror film than the ones that allow you to come away from the experience refreshed and having enjoyed the ride. It's up to you to decide which is the more disturbing thing in the long run. I can say that I haven't watched this film a second time--and I think that's a testament to how unsettling it can be. For a student of horror films, this is a must see. For anyone delving into the history of the slasher subgenre Black Christmas is essential viewing. For folks just looking for a film...well, as difficult as this film is it does have a lot going for it. To whit, I will give you the 5 Days of Black Christmas.
On the first day of Black Christmas my true love gave to me....a film with a hundred different titles.
Black Christmas has not always been called Black Christmas. This is one of the reasons that it has been slightly more obscure than Halloween or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of the other films in its category. Distributors in the US were concerned that the title would lead people to mistake it for a blaxploitation film and either avoid it because they weren't fans of Melvin van Peebles or were fans of Melvin van Peebles and would be disappointed by a Canadian slasher movie. Frankly, I think it's a good bet the same audience that saw The Omen also saw Shaft. If they hadn't there never would have been a film called Blacula.
At any rate, the film was released under such titles as Silent Night, Evil Night, Stranger in the House, We Wish You a Deadly Christmas, and The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove. NBC showed this film exactly one time on television before deciding it was too scary for TV.
On the second day of Christmas Bob Clark gave to me a Canada goose.
Did I mention that this film was a Canadian affair? There's nothing like winter in Canada in the early 1970s to give you a bleak film. In fact, Canada was also the origin of Halloween and My Bloody Valentine--which could lead you to suspect that there's a Canadian plot to keep Americans paranoid and up all night.
On the third day of Christmas Santa gave to me...a Red Ryder carbine-action air rifle.
Director Bob Clark would go on to direct such classics as Porky's and Porky's II as well as A Christmas Story. How about that for a festive Christmas film festival? Seriously, this sorority house could have used a kid with an air-rifle patrolling the place and maybe putting out someone's eyes.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me a dark old Canadian sorority house.
It's difficult to watch any movie from the 1970s and not chuckle at the terrible hair and fashion. Maybe the slasher is just disgusted by what people are wearing. I'm not saying that the girls are unattractive. Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey and Lynne Griffin are quite attractive and I could see how if it was 1974 and after a couple of Molson's Andrea Martin would be nice too. Heck, a six pack of Molson's and a cold night and maybe even the old drunk house mother would start looking good as a means of warming up. Still, the sorority house is populated by an unlikely crew of victims. There's the relatively decent girl Clare (Lynne Griffin, who looks at times like a proto-Saffron Burrows) who gets strangled and suffocated with a plastic sheet/curtain, wrapped up in that same plastic wrapping and put into a rocking chair by the window of the attic. So much for letting the nice girl survive.
The next nicest girl Jess (Olivia Hussey) is also the one with the biggest problems. She's pregnant and wants an abortion. Her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) is an angry pianist who wants her to keep the baby (before she got pregnant and desiring an abortion he was presumably a slightly less moody pianist) and is prepared to quit school so they can start that awkward little family. Peter is so angry that Jess ends up killing him with a fireplace poker when she's convinced he was the killer. (He wasn't. But he was angry enough to wreck a piano.) That's quite a bit of social commentary wrapped up in this relationship. For those who are convinced that slasher films have to follow certain rules it's hard to imagine one of them being that the one who survives the killing spree is pregnant and wants an abortion and ends up being left alone in the house with the killer at the end of the film. Not only does that violate the so-called "rules" of the subgenre, but it also violates a dozen "rules" of screenwriting. For that alone Black Christmas is a nice stick in the eye of the rules-hounds and screenwriting seminarians.
Now look at Peter and Jess again. Recognize them? At some point you've probably seen her as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Also she played the Virgin Mary in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. And Keir Dullea? Well, you might have seen him being stalked by a computer in Kubrick's 2001. That's right, Peter is better known as Dave. You'd think he'd be better at finding a killer and unplugging him, but no he's just good at smashing pianos angrily.
And then there are the other two sorority sisters, Phyl and Barb. Phyl is played by SCTV's Andrea Martin and Barb is played by Margot "Lois Lane" Kidder. Barb gets most of the best lines in this film. She has a long painful anecdote about seeing turtles doing it at the zoo and she tells the cops that the phone number at the sorority house is Fellatio 20880. The appropriately named Barb also comes out with the zinger "Darling, you can't rape a townie." Wow, that's pretty cold there, Barb. Barb is stabbed to death with a glass unicorn while a group of Christmas caroling children sing at the door, but it's a good bet Barb was too drunk to notice she was dead. Phyllis, on the other hand is quite sober when she goes upstairs to check on Barb and gets killed. It might have been better to also put her chubby boyfriend and his ridiculous jewfro out of everyone's misery.
The house mother of this crew is an old drunk nicknamed Mrs. Mac who used to be quite the floozie and now just hides whiskey in various locations all around the house. As you can imagine, she has to die in a particularly ingenious way with a crane hook.
As for Jess, she has the worst time of it as she is in the house alone with the killer and doesn't even know it. When she finally gets the word that the killer has been calling from inside the house the whole time it's still pretty terrifying even though we already know that to be the case.
On the fifth day of Christmas Herman Melville gave to me...a very serious Ahab character.
The white knight of the film is Lt. Kenneth Fuller played by the great John Saxon who would go on to play another police Lieutenant in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Saxon brings a sense of earnestness and reassurance to the story. He's not so much an Ahab as an Ishmael. Once he's on the case you think maybe the girls have a chance. But then, they don't but it's not really Fuller's fault.
If you're looking for a genuine fright fest and don't want to deal with blood and gore, then Black Christmas is a good bet. Sure, there are a lot of funny aspects to something this old, but on the other hand the film is still revolutionary compared to the relatively conservative attitudes (both aesthetic and social) that are enshrined in more contemporary fare. At any rate, the juxtaposition of a happy holiday with brutal horror is another thing that we really owe to Black Christmas which paved the way not only for so many Christmas themed horror films but also a slew of other holiday slasher films like My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, Prom Night, Slay-bor Day, etc.
Special Edition Bonus Material
1. 12 Days of Black Christmas (2006)
Written and Directed by Dan Duffin
John Saxon narrates this short history about the process of making Black Christmas and its place in horror film history. The script was based on a series of killings in Montreal. Clark did the film as an exercise in formal experimentation. Could you make film where you never see the killer and which lacks the typical kind of resolution you get elsewhere? Could it work? The live interviews included here are the edited versions of the interviews with Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Art Hindle that are included separately along with interviews with John Saxon, Lynne Griffin, Doug McGrath (who played Sgt. Nash), art director Karen Bromley. Also making an appearance is cameraman Bert Dunk, who was responsible for much of the POV shooting that made this such an innovative film. Carl Zittrer notes how Bob Clark asked for less scoring and the overall effect is that's it a quieter film that doesn't give away too much or overdetermine the direction of the film.
2. "Uncovered" Sound Scenes
A. Trellis Climb -- In this sound mix you can hear the conversations inside the house more clearly while the killer climbs the trellis.
B. Final pan
Billy (the killer) can be clearly heard giggling in the final series of shots that pan about the house where Jess is sleeping off the stress of the terror ride. It's pretty damn creepy.
I don't know if these scenes add much.
3. Midnight Q&A
Taped after a midnight screening of Black Christmas at the Nuart in Santa Monica, California in December 2004 this series of audience questions features composer Carl Zittrer, John Saxon and Bob Clark. Clark and his son were killed in a head on collision with a drunk driver in April 2007.
Clark mentions that the remake is in the works that will go deeper into the question of the background of the killer, Billy and his sister Agnes who he mentions in his ramblings.
Saxon's part originally went to Edmond O'Brien because Saxon had a scheduling conflict but O'Brien was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and had to be let go and luckily Saxon was available again.
4. Interviews
Olivia Hussey
Black Christmas I took because I had just given birth to my first child and I'd never done a scary film...
These interviews are a bit rough--the interviewer isn't the smoothest one I've ever heard--but I think the relative unpolished aspect of them gives them a genuineness that is missing from the more packaged making of things that are usually attached as special features. It's nice getting a retrospective look at a film from people who haven't completely disowned it. Hussey has some good points about how the mystery of not knowing is scarier than films that show and tell everything.
Margot Kidder
"When you did horror movies you sort of thought nobody would see them..."
Margot Kidder sitting poolside and recounting the days of being young and Canadian and struggling as an actor.
"As young people we were a lot looser than you guys are."
True enough. I like the things Kidder has to say about career advice. It's all surprisingly lucid.
Art Hindle
Hindle, who played Clare's boyfriend has some of the best memories of the film. He apparently used his own coat in the film and still has it. The interviewers, though, seem like barely competent and overeager fanboys.
Directed by Bob Clark, Screenplay by Roy Moore
Black Christmas is one of the bleakest films ever. It's bleak even for a horror movie. It's bleaker than Bleak House by a long shot. There's something appropriately unsettling about a horror film where all you see is a pair of hands from the killer's perspective and not only is there no comeuppance for the murderer but there's not even the satisfaction of learning anything about the killer. Isn't that what really scares people? The closest glimpse we get of the killer is a quick shot of him in a closet as he's strangling one of his victims and his voice in the multiple obscene phone calls he makes to the sorority house he is stalking. This is the only sure indication of the killer's gender. At some point in the calls he says his name is Billy and later he speaks as if he's talking to someone named Agnes. The phone calls are barely intelligible. An analogously bleak movie would be if you took Jaws and shot most of it from the perspective of the shark and let the shark get away without showing the audience so much as a fin. That's how bleak Black Christmas is.
Of course, it's a movie from the '70s, so there's almost an expectation that it will be a bleaker film than anything we can get today. A contemporary horror film will be more graphic, more disgusting, more visually violent than something like Black Christmas, but for the most part they can't compare with the genuine unsettling nature of the unseen and the unknown and yet (because this film does not have anything supernatural in it) not unbelievable or impossible.
So what's the big deal about Black Christmas? Why did anyone feel the need to remake it? Look at the date on it. It precedes Halloween, Friday the 13th and all the other slasher classics and it came out the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is the bleak maternal grandfather of the sorority house massacre sub genre (though there were other sorority house massacre films that preceded Black Christmas). If you've grown tired of the old cliche of the phone calls that are traced to someone calling from inside the house of the victim then you should know that Black Christmas is the film that first used that old gag. In fact, the scenes in the telephone exchange provide an interesting historical record of telecommunications systems and their physical operation.
The thing that is unsettling about a film like Black Christmas is that it doesn't really give you the chance to shake off the horror at the end. Even in films that pop back with the shocker ending you are allowed some degree of understanding of the reasons (albeit usually crazy) for the killings. You're given some psychic solace of knowledge about the perpetrator of the preceding violence. But in this film we don't really get much of anything and what's more, the killer is still on the loose in the house at the end of the film while the police are standing guard outside. The symbolism is obvious: the danger is within and the system only knows how to guard from danger from without, even when the spate of killings was obviously perpetrated from within the house and the police haven't made a thorough enough search to notice the dead girl in the attic sitting right in front of the window. I personally found that to be the most unsettling thing of all: that the authorities are still searching for the first victim when her body is sitting wrapped in a plastic curtain right in front of the attic window visible to the street below if you just look hard enough. It's as if the real horror you take away from this film is that the world is full of un-thorough and incompetent guardians who are of no use when a psycho decides to go on a rampage. All of this makes this film a purer type of horror film than the ones that allow you to come away from the experience refreshed and having enjoyed the ride. It's up to you to decide which is the more disturbing thing in the long run. I can say that I haven't watched this film a second time--and I think that's a testament to how unsettling it can be. For a student of horror films, this is a must see. For anyone delving into the history of the slasher subgenre Black Christmas is essential viewing. For folks just looking for a film...well, as difficult as this film is it does have a lot going for it. To whit, I will give you the 5 Days of Black Christmas.
On the first day of Black Christmas my true love gave to me....a film with a hundred different titles.
Black Christmas has not always been called Black Christmas. This is one of the reasons that it has been slightly more obscure than Halloween or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any of the other films in its category. Distributors in the US were concerned that the title would lead people to mistake it for a blaxploitation film and either avoid it because they weren't fans of Melvin van Peebles or were fans of Melvin van Peebles and would be disappointed by a Canadian slasher movie. Frankly, I think it's a good bet the same audience that saw The Omen also saw Shaft. If they hadn't there never would have been a film called Blacula.
At any rate, the film was released under such titles as Silent Night, Evil Night, Stranger in the House, We Wish You a Deadly Christmas, and The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove. NBC showed this film exactly one time on television before deciding it was too scary for TV.
On the second day of Christmas Bob Clark gave to me a Canada goose.
Did I mention that this film was a Canadian affair? There's nothing like winter in Canada in the early 1970s to give you a bleak film. In fact, Canada was also the origin of Halloween and My Bloody Valentine--which could lead you to suspect that there's a Canadian plot to keep Americans paranoid and up all night.
On the third day of Christmas Santa gave to me...a Red Ryder carbine-action air rifle.
Director Bob Clark would go on to direct such classics as Porky's and Porky's II as well as A Christmas Story. How about that for a festive Christmas film festival? Seriously, this sorority house could have used a kid with an air-rifle patrolling the place and maybe putting out someone's eyes.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me a dark old Canadian sorority house.
It's difficult to watch any movie from the 1970s and not chuckle at the terrible hair and fashion. Maybe the slasher is just disgusted by what people are wearing. I'm not saying that the girls are unattractive. Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey and Lynne Griffin are quite attractive and I could see how if it was 1974 and after a couple of Molson's Andrea Martin would be nice too. Heck, a six pack of Molson's and a cold night and maybe even the old drunk house mother would start looking good as a means of warming up. Still, the sorority house is populated by an unlikely crew of victims. There's the relatively decent girl Clare (Lynne Griffin, who looks at times like a proto-Saffron Burrows) who gets strangled and suffocated with a plastic sheet/curtain, wrapped up in that same plastic wrapping and put into a rocking chair by the window of the attic. So much for letting the nice girl survive.
The next nicest girl Jess (Olivia Hussey) is also the one with the biggest problems. She's pregnant and wants an abortion. Her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) is an angry pianist who wants her to keep the baby (before she got pregnant and desiring an abortion he was presumably a slightly less moody pianist) and is prepared to quit school so they can start that awkward little family. Peter is so angry that Jess ends up killing him with a fireplace poker when she's convinced he was the killer. (He wasn't. But he was angry enough to wreck a piano.) That's quite a bit of social commentary wrapped up in this relationship. For those who are convinced that slasher films have to follow certain rules it's hard to imagine one of them being that the one who survives the killing spree is pregnant and wants an abortion and ends up being left alone in the house with the killer at the end of the film. Not only does that violate the so-called "rules" of the subgenre, but it also violates a dozen "rules" of screenwriting. For that alone Black Christmas is a nice stick in the eye of the rules-hounds and screenwriting seminarians.
Now look at Peter and Jess again. Recognize them? At some point you've probably seen her as Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Also she played the Virgin Mary in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. And Keir Dullea? Well, you might have seen him being stalked by a computer in Kubrick's 2001. That's right, Peter is better known as Dave. You'd think he'd be better at finding a killer and unplugging him, but no he's just good at smashing pianos angrily.
And then there are the other two sorority sisters, Phyl and Barb. Phyl is played by SCTV's Andrea Martin and Barb is played by Margot "Lois Lane" Kidder. Barb gets most of the best lines in this film. She has a long painful anecdote about seeing turtles doing it at the zoo and she tells the cops that the phone number at the sorority house is Fellatio 20880. The appropriately named Barb also comes out with the zinger "Darling, you can't rape a townie." Wow, that's pretty cold there, Barb. Barb is stabbed to death with a glass unicorn while a group of Christmas caroling children sing at the door, but it's a good bet Barb was too drunk to notice she was dead. Phyllis, on the other hand is quite sober when she goes upstairs to check on Barb and gets killed. It might have been better to also put her chubby boyfriend and his ridiculous jewfro out of everyone's misery.
The house mother of this crew is an old drunk nicknamed Mrs. Mac who used to be quite the floozie and now just hides whiskey in various locations all around the house. As you can imagine, she has to die in a particularly ingenious way with a crane hook.
As for Jess, she has the worst time of it as she is in the house alone with the killer and doesn't even know it. When she finally gets the word that the killer has been calling from inside the house the whole time it's still pretty terrifying even though we already know that to be the case.
On the fifth day of Christmas Herman Melville gave to me...a very serious Ahab character.
The white knight of the film is Lt. Kenneth Fuller played by the great John Saxon who would go on to play another police Lieutenant in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Saxon brings a sense of earnestness and reassurance to the story. He's not so much an Ahab as an Ishmael. Once he's on the case you think maybe the girls have a chance. But then, they don't but it's not really Fuller's fault.
If you're looking for a genuine fright fest and don't want to deal with blood and gore, then Black Christmas is a good bet. Sure, there are a lot of funny aspects to something this old, but on the other hand the film is still revolutionary compared to the relatively conservative attitudes (both aesthetic and social) that are enshrined in more contemporary fare. At any rate, the juxtaposition of a happy holiday with brutal horror is another thing that we really owe to Black Christmas which paved the way not only for so many Christmas themed horror films but also a slew of other holiday slasher films like My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, Prom Night, Slay-bor Day, etc.
Special Edition Bonus Material
1. 12 Days of Black Christmas (2006)
Written and Directed by Dan Duffin
John Saxon narrates this short history about the process of making Black Christmas and its place in horror film history. The script was based on a series of killings in Montreal. Clark did the film as an exercise in formal experimentation. Could you make film where you never see the killer and which lacks the typical kind of resolution you get elsewhere? Could it work? The live interviews included here are the edited versions of the interviews with Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder and Art Hindle that are included separately along with interviews with John Saxon, Lynne Griffin, Doug McGrath (who played Sgt. Nash), art director Karen Bromley. Also making an appearance is cameraman Bert Dunk, who was responsible for much of the POV shooting that made this such an innovative film. Carl Zittrer notes how Bob Clark asked for less scoring and the overall effect is that's it a quieter film that doesn't give away too much or overdetermine the direction of the film.
2. "Uncovered" Sound Scenes
A. Trellis Climb -- In this sound mix you can hear the conversations inside the house more clearly while the killer climbs the trellis.
B. Final pan
Billy (the killer) can be clearly heard giggling in the final series of shots that pan about the house where Jess is sleeping off the stress of the terror ride. It's pretty damn creepy.
I don't know if these scenes add much.
3. Midnight Q&A
Taped after a midnight screening of Black Christmas at the Nuart in Santa Monica, California in December 2004 this series of audience questions features composer Carl Zittrer, John Saxon and Bob Clark. Clark and his son were killed in a head on collision with a drunk driver in April 2007.
Clark mentions that the remake is in the works that will go deeper into the question of the background of the killer, Billy and his sister Agnes who he mentions in his ramblings.
Saxon's part originally went to Edmond O'Brien because Saxon had a scheduling conflict but O'Brien was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and had to be let go and luckily Saxon was available again.
4. Interviews
Olivia Hussey
Black Christmas I took because I had just given birth to my first child and I'd never done a scary film...
These interviews are a bit rough--the interviewer isn't the smoothest one I've ever heard--but I think the relative unpolished aspect of them gives them a genuineness that is missing from the more packaged making of things that are usually attached as special features. It's nice getting a retrospective look at a film from people who haven't completely disowned it. Hussey has some good points about how the mystery of not knowing is scarier than films that show and tell everything.
Margot Kidder
"When you did horror movies you sort of thought nobody would see them..."
Margot Kidder sitting poolside and recounting the days of being young and Canadian and struggling as an actor.
"As young people we were a lot looser than you guys are."
True enough. I like the things Kidder has to say about career advice. It's all surprisingly lucid.
Art Hindle
Hindle, who played Clare's boyfriend has some of the best memories of the film. He apparently used his own coat in the film and still has it. The interviewers, though, seem like barely competent and overeager fanboys.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Strong Enough for a man, but pH balanced for a woman
Hostel: Part II (2007)
Directed by Eli Roth, Screenplay by Eli Roth
Think of the first Hostel as a really long introduction to this film, which is in every way a superior piece. There are parts of Hostel Part II that show the loving care of a really beautiful art film. There are real characters here with genuine plot twists and I feel there's a genuinely intelligent thought-provoking exercise here. In pretty much every way Hostel II surpasses the first part, which in retrospect feels like an elaborate setup for the second part. As Roth himself notes, this Hostel was his attempt to make a giallo film and just to underscore that he even brought in guest appearances by several renowned Italian actors and directors.
Part II isn't just a sequel or a variation on a theme, it is a counterpoint to the first part that really extends the ideas to new ground. They are two films that have to be considered together as one story. This is a film that explores gender and class in a way that does credit to the horror genre as a whole. A lot of what could be said about the first Hostel might have been a stretch, but anything you say about this part is right on the money. It's not cheap exploitation, even though it does use quite a bit of cheap exploitation.
Right off the bat this film undermines everything we got out of the first part. We start by getting a sequence of Paxton (Jay Hernandez) making his escape on the train only to find himself in an Italian hospital where he is stabbed to death by an evil policeman played by Italian actor Luc Merenda, who came out of retirement just to do this one scene. (His translator is played by another great Italian, Susanna Bequer.) This scene highlights the global reach of Elite Hunting and how those who have the hound tattoo are forever linked in a shadowy way. But, this whole scene turns out to have been a paranoid delusion of Paxton, who wakes up in bed with Jordan Ladd. Granted, he's still missing the fingers he lost to that guy with the chainsaw, but things can't be that bad if he's got Jordan Ladd with him. But he is so paranoid that his girlfriend (who apparently took him back out of pity for his missing fingers and exotic story) is having second thoughts about him. And nobody has told Josh's family what happened to him. They still think he's backpacking around Europe. Of course, Paxton has reason to be paranoid and the only surprise when we see him dead at the kitchen table is just how gruesome it is to see a cat licking the stump where someone's head used to be. And this time, it's not a dream sequence. I love how it pretty much makes all of that time invested in seeing Paxton escape in the first movie seem like so much time wasted. He never really had a chance. And what I really like about this whole sequence is that it's a rare occasion of a horror film dealing with the consequences of the mayhem that occurs. The survivors (even if they aren't hunted down and killed) are always going to lug around the baggage (that is, if they don't have trouble lugging around the baggage on account of the missing fingers.) People will have questions about the people who are missing. Anyhow, this bit of prelude was more of a coda to the last film which culminates in a sharply dressed tough guy who gets a box delivered to him. (The box has Paxton's head in it.) The man, we will find out later, is Sasha (Milan Knazko, who was Slovakia's Minister of Culture from 1998-2002) and he's the man behind Elite Hunting. And behind every Eastern European oligarch who makes his money from people who like to kill other people is an adorable pair of hunting hounds. Seriously, the dogs are so cute.
Anyhow, now we meet our new trio of victims-to-be: three American girls taking a life-drawing class in Rome--Beth (Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo). Beth seems a bit serious (and maybe bi-curious?), Whitney is the party girl best friend and Lorna is a bookworm loner girl who probably writes in her journal about horses and rainbows and elf-maidens. First we get a bit of full frontal male art model nudity and then we get a topless girl. (It's all about evening out some of the gender odds in this film.) I have to briefly digress to mention that the art professor is played by the legendary Edwige Fenech who is still a stunningly beautiful woman and whose film work (especially in Italian comedies) deserves a serious look. Anyhow, the question is what kind of bait will get these girls to Slovakia? The answer is Axelle (Vera Jordanova). Axelle is in some way related to Alex the mole-face guy who lured the guys to Slovakia in the first film. Axelle's methodology is interesting, because after the girls are scared by some druggie hooligans on the train out of Rome she shows up to suggest that they can go relax in the hot springs spa that she likes in Slovakia. When Whitney pipes up as the dumb American wondering about the war there, it's Beth who steps up and says that the wars were in Bosnia. Thank you, Beth, for proving that some Americans do actually read and comprehend the news and things like books. The girls are lured by the idea of spending a nice relaxing weekend at a spa.
They show up at the old hostel and are greeted by the smiling goofy-ass desk clerk (Milda Havlas) who turns their attention to the harvest festival. Meanwhile he takes their passports and scans their pictures where they are immediately put up in an online auction. And this is where we get the other structural innovation of this film which is that it not only gives us a further glimpse into the operations of Elite Hunting but it also introduces us to a pair of Americans who show up to do some killing, so we get to watch the hunters and the hunted. It's seriously disconcerting to watch people going about their day while other people are getting on their blackberries to bid on a chance to murder someone. And it's also more than a bit upsetting to see how extremely normal (if obviously wealthy) the people doing the bidding are. These aren't supernatural stalkers or psychopaths with elaborate plans of revenge, they are ordinary people looking for an exotic travel experience--and that is infinitely scarier and more horrifying than a ghost story. (The fact that the villains we follow are also American pretty much overturns most of the expectations of xenophobia that were left from the first Hostel. Though, to be fair, even in the first film we got to see an American participant in the killing side.)
Todd (Richard Burgi) is treating his friend Stuart (Roger Bart) to a vacation in Slovakia complete with the opportunity to walk into a torture chamber and kill an attractive American girl. What are friends for? I think this is the logical conclusion to the fad of extreme sports, extreme vacations, extreme Thai hooker rafting expeditions etc.
Todd is a blustering coke-snorting ass who just can't find enough excitement to keep going and Stuart is a whipped man in a business suit who gets dragged along for all the rides that end in gonorrhea. The fact that both of these actors were on Desperate Housewives really adds a lot to their characters--a certain desperation to get the hell out of the cul-de-sac and do something else with their lives.
Meanwhile, the girls are having quite a time walking around the old town, getting spit on by the street urchins, and generally enjoying all the sights and sounds of central Europe. At the festival Whitney hooks up with a dubious looking guy named Miroslav (Stanislav Ianevski). You might recognize this guy as Victor Krum from the Harry Potter films. The degree of suspicion we are expected to have for this character is an interesting play on the xenophobic paranoia we got from the first film.
We also learn at the festival the important fact that Beth is a rich heiress. She is so rich, that she gives her father an allowance instead of the other way around. Beth has a creepy time at the festival as she is approached by a local who asks her to dance and when she refuses he says he "could have helped" her. Then the desk clerk shows up to ask Beth what the guy said to her and it's a credit to Beth that she is alert enough to lie to the desk clerk. Also, Stuart (who has arrived in town) shows up to get a closer look at the girl he's going to kill. Apparently Beth is a dead ringer for Stuart's emasculating wife.
Meanwhile, Whitney decides to get Lorna drunk because she thinks that Lorna is a stick in the mud. It turns out that Lorna is on some serious meds that react rather poorly to alchohol. While this doesn't lead to any medical consequences it does lead to Lorna making the bad decision to take a boat ride with a local guy.
Next thing she knows she's stark naked and hanging upside down from a chain in a torture chamber/bath. This is not exactly the spa treatment she was expecting.
Lorna's killing is the nastiest, most sexualized part of this film. Lorna's killer Mrs. Bathory (Monika Malacova) strips off and takes a scythe to Lorna so she can bathe in the girls fresh blood. Yes, this is a nasty piece of business but it is also a reference to the infamous "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Bathory who allegedly murdered young girls and bathed in virgins' blood to stay forever young. So, at least it's a literate reference, even if it's quite disturbing. The aesthetics of the blood bath, though, are quite good. There are some excellent scenic, lighting and effects choices here and because we are invested in Lorna the whole thing is quite disturbing.
The next morning Whitney gets snatched from the spa and Beth tries to make a run for it. Beth makes it all the way into the forest where she is confronted by the street kids. She is then rescued by Axelle, who shows up with Sasha. Sasha then makes the kids choose one from among them to die and the kids all gang up and push one of their own forward as a sacrifice for Sasha to shoot. Sasha is not to be screwed with.
Beth winds up at Sasha's villa, which has a pair of stone hunting hounds in front of the door and a full length portrait of Axelle on the staircase. Beth later spies a set of pictures including Axelle and a creepy guy from the train (as well as a group shot of Axelle, Alex, Natalya and Svetlana). Beth tries to make a second break for it when she realizes what Axelle and Sasha are up to, but she doesn't get anywhere.
Then there's the scene that is truly a work of art. It's a lengthy scene from the moment Stuart and Todd get the call that their girls are ready and follows them as they walk through the process and choose their implements of killing and torture and then enter the chamber. The sequence has no dialogue, is scored with a magnificent piece of music and has some of the most artful cinematography I've seen in a while. It really is a gem hidden in this film and is worth seeing on its own for those too squeamish to deal with the rest of the film.
Anyhow, the rest of the film is about how Todd and Stuart invert their characters. Todd is having a hilarious time threatening Whitney with a circular saw while Stuart is scared and almost weepy with Beth. Stuart and Beth decide to escape, but when Beth says something emasculating to Stuart that reminds him of his wife, he clocks her and ties her back up again. Todd has a funny sequence where the cord on the saw is too short and then when the cord is finally long enough he's playing around when he accidently puts the saw into Whitney's head and it gets caught on her hair and cuts her up nastily but doesn't kill her. This actually sickens Todd. (Turns out he wasn't as tough as he thought he was.) He tries to leave but the place has strict rules (and even stricter security in the wake of Paxton's escape--again, it's all about consequences). The staff unleash the dogs on Todd and he is cut to pieces. This prompts the staff to try to make lemonade by having a special limited-time offer to the customers for finishing off Whitney. This is where we get a cameo from Ruggero Deodato, the director of the infamous Cannibal Holocaust as...a cannibal who is enjoying a meal made of strips of flesh taken off of the still somewhat living Miroslav. When Stuart is shown the picture it cements his new attitude and he goes off to kill Whitney. We never see what he does and how he does it (again, this film is more restrained than its reputation) and when he comes back he looks like a different person, a harder, colder man.
But Beth won't give up. She lures Stuart with sex (trying to get him to sympathize with her because she's not his wife and can maybe make up for what his wife has done to him.) Stuart (like a lot of men) falls for it and Beth gets the drop on him. She proceeds to beat the crap out of him to get the code to the door. But the security system for the facility is now pretty airtight and they come through the door to find her holding a pistol in the direction of the door and a pair of shears to Stuart's genitals. It looks like it's curtains for the girl and Stuart says so. But, Beth is rich and Stuart has a mortgage and kids in expensive schools and this film is not so much about gender roles as it is about class and fiscal power. Stuart can't buy his way out of this situation, but Beth can and she does. All she has to do is to obey the rules of the facility--she has to kill someone and she has to get a tattoo. So, she cuts off Stuart's junk and tosses it to the dogs and walks over to get her tattoo and make the financial arrangements. Money is power. That's the ultimate lesson of this film. If you have the money then you can hold someone's life in your hands. Sure, there is coercive power and institutional power (like Elite Hunting's rules) but in the end what really empowers Beth and saves her compared to her friends is not so much a mystical character trait or a value (virginity, intelligence, humanity or anything of the sort) it is raw financial power and the intelligence to know that she can use it to bargain.
And once Beth is able to reassert he power she makes one final gesture by paying off the street kids to lure Axelle out into the forest where Beth decapitates her. The film ends with some happy European folk music while the little urchins play soccer with Axelle's head. It's the simple pleasures that are sometimes the best ones.
As gruesome as this film gets (and it is gruesome all along the way) it is also a great story with a real hard-edged cynical message at its core which is gratifyingly realistic. This film has a lot going for it and it is certainly better than the films it regularly gets lopped together with in the torture-porn subgenre. This film deserves better than that and I have to say that it made me respect Eli Roth as a storyteller.
On the other hand, it's kind of depressing to think that money can in fact buy your way out of all kinds of trouble. Them's that have it can even survive a horror movie torture chamber. Them's that don't--well, we've seen plenty of what happens to them's that don't.
On a sidenote, I have to mention that Inya, the woman who runs the operations at Elite Hunting in this film is played by Zuzana Geislerova who played the Reverend Mother in the film adaptation of Children of Dune.
Special Features
Previews
1. Coming to Blu-Ray
Look, it's Will Ferrell in high definition. Just what you've always wanted. Sure, floating cars would have been nice, but Will Ferrell in hi-def right in your own home? That's so much better.
2. 30 Days of Night
This is a pretty good trailer with very nice pacing and tone. And it's nice to go back and see uncharming vampires in action.
3. Boogeyman 2
Boogeyman 2: Electric Boogeymanaloo seems to be a cross between Nightmare on Elm Street and The Haunting.
4. Rise: Blood Hunter
Lucy Liu wants revenge for being turned into a vampire. In the sequel she gets revenge on her agent for getting her this role.
5. Resident Evil: Extinction
I'm beginning to get as annoyed by the Title-Colon-Subtitle style of titles as I am of numbered titles. Those Clint Eastwood orangutan movies didn't need numbers or colons and whatnot to get the point across that they were related.
6. Kaw
That's the sound that the evil birds make just before they pluck your eyes out for being tempted to see this movie.
7. Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud
I am so far out of the loop that I never even knew there was a first Pumpkinhead, much less that the whole thing had devolved into a retelling of the Hatfield/McCoy feud.
8. Fearnet.Com
For those people who want to take a break from playing Farmville.
Commentaries
1. Commentary with Eli Roth
Another pretty decent lesson in filmmaking with Eli Roth. Again he comes across as an intelligent filmmaker whose ideas are worth a listen.
2. Commentary with Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino and Gabriel Roth
It's sometimes a bit tiring to listen to Quentin Tarantino watch a film but he does get the conversation rolling pretty well and Eli Roth and his brother Gabriel have a lot of good anecdotes to share and it's a good insight into the process and ideas behind this film.
3. Commentary with Eli Roth, Lauren German, Vera Jordanova and Richard Burgi
This track is still somewhat along the lines of the talk show format that was on Hostel I, but at least whenever someone is added to the commentary they stay on and converse with the next group. Richard Burgi and Lauren German are really great commentators and worth a chuckle or two.
Deleted Scenes
1. The Trash Man
This is a continuation of the scene after Jordan Ladd discovers Paxton's head and she is caught in the kitchen by a guy with a chainsaw. It does answer the question of what happens to Paxton's girlfriend.
2. Whitney's Sketch
"One of the main complaints I heard from female Hostel fans was that there was too much female nudity, which I never really saw as a problem. So I figured I'd start off the sequel with a lingering cock shot just to balance things out. Happy now?"
Jeez, Eli, you don't have to sound so angry and defensive about throwing in a lingering cock shot. I'm angry just having to know that the phrase "lingering cock shot" exists. Lingering cock shot. It's an addictive set of words. At any rate, Whitney's sketch is a closeup of the aforementioned cock (and, let's not forget the nutsack accessory that goes with it.) You have to admire Whitney's concentration of efforts.
3. Whitney's Rant
Whitney ranting about Lorna.
Her idea of a good time is like going to the museum or like taking a hot bath and masturbating to the Brothers Karamazov while listening to sadcore.
Replace the Dostoyevsky with Tolstory and I'd call that a great way to spend a Thursday night.
4. The Plants
Evil girls in the hostel watching Pulp Fiction. Gives away a little too much about just how big the evil operation is.
5. The Van
You should never take a ride from a bunch of Eastern Europeans in a van. Even these girls know better than that. Best line goes to Whitney: "My barf tastes cidery."
6. Rape Shower
Drunk girls making fun of the After School Special where a girl is in a shower and crying. A bit tacky. It does have an element of horror karma to it when the girls are put through something a lot worse. Rape Shower is probably the worst title for anything I've ever seen (and I'm including Lingering Cock Shot in this equation.)
7. The Tool Checkout Room
I like the shopping spree aspect of this scene and how it develops the characters of the would-be killers in their browsing of the instruments of torture, but the montage scene is such great cinema that I can't argue with the choice to cut this fun dialogue out.
8. The Changing Room
Nervous jokes as the guys get ready to get changed into the killing outfits.
9. "This Is It"
Another nervous moment before the guys go into their killing chambers. Again, the montage is so much better.
10. Nozdrovia
Beth has a drink with Sasha at the conclusion of their business. This is where Beth discovers that Sasha is related to Axelle. It ends with Beth being forced to get the tattoo, but the manhandling undercuts the monetary exchange which guarantees her safety and her release after she kills Stuart and we really don't need to know the precise relationship between Sasha and Axelle to know that it's close and the way the film stands you get a sense that once she's paid and killed Sasha and the rest of the Elite Hunting crew are downright friendly, and this scene sort of continues to give them menace when it's more interesting that they aren't menacing anymore when she's getting the tattoo without this scene.
Hostel Part II: The Next Level
A friendly behind the scenes look at the complete process of making the film. Again, I think these are useful not just as a means of learning about filmmaking but also as a way of demystifying the images of the film itself. There's something reassuring about watching actors in a make-up chair getting gore put on them.
The end of this piece does raise the question of the relationship of the behind the scenes documentary crew and the film crew itself given the number of angry glares tossed toward the camera.
The Art of KNB EFX
This feels almost like an extended advertisement/testimonial for KNB. They obviously do good work. They win bonus points for guiding you through the peocess of making the dog food/gelatin genitals that get tossed to the dog at the end of the film.
Production Design
This is a brief look at the construction of the sets for the train, the look of the village festival masks and the chamber of horrors, which is a more extensive facility this time around.
Hostel Part II: A Legacy of Torture
"Plato said it best when he said that the good dream about what the bad do." Dr. Sheldon Roth
This is an interesting beginning of a discussion about the ideas and social commentary in this film (including comments by Eli Roth's parents) and then it goes into a history of torture and representations of torture as well as an introduction to the Italian giallo legends involved in this film.
Blood & Guts Gag Reel
All horror films should include a blooper reel. It really helps take the edge off. And those dogs are just so cute.
"The Treatment" Radio Interview with Eli Roth and Elvis Mitchell
I like discussions of film, but Elvis Mitchell is no Terry Gross, He starts off by saying that this film is more personal and less social commentary than the first Hostel. Really? Still, it's nice to hear someone who can talk about film in a more thoughtful way than Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight.
Directed by Eli Roth, Screenplay by Eli Roth
Think of the first Hostel as a really long introduction to this film, which is in every way a superior piece. There are parts of Hostel Part II that show the loving care of a really beautiful art film. There are real characters here with genuine plot twists and I feel there's a genuinely intelligent thought-provoking exercise here. In pretty much every way Hostel II surpasses the first part, which in retrospect feels like an elaborate setup for the second part. As Roth himself notes, this Hostel was his attempt to make a giallo film and just to underscore that he even brought in guest appearances by several renowned Italian actors and directors.
Part II isn't just a sequel or a variation on a theme, it is a counterpoint to the first part that really extends the ideas to new ground. They are two films that have to be considered together as one story. This is a film that explores gender and class in a way that does credit to the horror genre as a whole. A lot of what could be said about the first Hostel might have been a stretch, but anything you say about this part is right on the money. It's not cheap exploitation, even though it does use quite a bit of cheap exploitation.
Right off the bat this film undermines everything we got out of the first part. We start by getting a sequence of Paxton (Jay Hernandez) making his escape on the train only to find himself in an Italian hospital where he is stabbed to death by an evil policeman played by Italian actor Luc Merenda, who came out of retirement just to do this one scene. (His translator is played by another great Italian, Susanna Bequer.) This scene highlights the global reach of Elite Hunting and how those who have the hound tattoo are forever linked in a shadowy way. But, this whole scene turns out to have been a paranoid delusion of Paxton, who wakes up in bed with Jordan Ladd. Granted, he's still missing the fingers he lost to that guy with the chainsaw, but things can't be that bad if he's got Jordan Ladd with him. But he is so paranoid that his girlfriend (who apparently took him back out of pity for his missing fingers and exotic story) is having second thoughts about him. And nobody has told Josh's family what happened to him. They still think he's backpacking around Europe. Of course, Paxton has reason to be paranoid and the only surprise when we see him dead at the kitchen table is just how gruesome it is to see a cat licking the stump where someone's head used to be. And this time, it's not a dream sequence. I love how it pretty much makes all of that time invested in seeing Paxton escape in the first movie seem like so much time wasted. He never really had a chance. And what I really like about this whole sequence is that it's a rare occasion of a horror film dealing with the consequences of the mayhem that occurs. The survivors (even if they aren't hunted down and killed) are always going to lug around the baggage (that is, if they don't have trouble lugging around the baggage on account of the missing fingers.) People will have questions about the people who are missing. Anyhow, this bit of prelude was more of a coda to the last film which culminates in a sharply dressed tough guy who gets a box delivered to him. (The box has Paxton's head in it.) The man, we will find out later, is Sasha (Milan Knazko, who was Slovakia's Minister of Culture from 1998-2002) and he's the man behind Elite Hunting. And behind every Eastern European oligarch who makes his money from people who like to kill other people is an adorable pair of hunting hounds. Seriously, the dogs are so cute.
Anyhow, now we meet our new trio of victims-to-be: three American girls taking a life-drawing class in Rome--Beth (Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo). Beth seems a bit serious (and maybe bi-curious?), Whitney is the party girl best friend and Lorna is a bookworm loner girl who probably writes in her journal about horses and rainbows and elf-maidens. First we get a bit of full frontal male art model nudity and then we get a topless girl. (It's all about evening out some of the gender odds in this film.) I have to briefly digress to mention that the art professor is played by the legendary Edwige Fenech who is still a stunningly beautiful woman and whose film work (especially in Italian comedies) deserves a serious look. Anyhow, the question is what kind of bait will get these girls to Slovakia? The answer is Axelle (Vera Jordanova). Axelle is in some way related to Alex the mole-face guy who lured the guys to Slovakia in the first film. Axelle's methodology is interesting, because after the girls are scared by some druggie hooligans on the train out of Rome she shows up to suggest that they can go relax in the hot springs spa that she likes in Slovakia. When Whitney pipes up as the dumb American wondering about the war there, it's Beth who steps up and says that the wars were in Bosnia. Thank you, Beth, for proving that some Americans do actually read and comprehend the news and things like books. The girls are lured by the idea of spending a nice relaxing weekend at a spa.
They show up at the old hostel and are greeted by the smiling goofy-ass desk clerk (Milda Havlas) who turns their attention to the harvest festival. Meanwhile he takes their passports and scans their pictures where they are immediately put up in an online auction. And this is where we get the other structural innovation of this film which is that it not only gives us a further glimpse into the operations of Elite Hunting but it also introduces us to a pair of Americans who show up to do some killing, so we get to watch the hunters and the hunted. It's seriously disconcerting to watch people going about their day while other people are getting on their blackberries to bid on a chance to murder someone. And it's also more than a bit upsetting to see how extremely normal (if obviously wealthy) the people doing the bidding are. These aren't supernatural stalkers or psychopaths with elaborate plans of revenge, they are ordinary people looking for an exotic travel experience--and that is infinitely scarier and more horrifying than a ghost story. (The fact that the villains we follow are also American pretty much overturns most of the expectations of xenophobia that were left from the first Hostel. Though, to be fair, even in the first film we got to see an American participant in the killing side.)
Todd (Richard Burgi) is treating his friend Stuart (Roger Bart) to a vacation in Slovakia complete with the opportunity to walk into a torture chamber and kill an attractive American girl. What are friends for? I think this is the logical conclusion to the fad of extreme sports, extreme vacations, extreme Thai hooker rafting expeditions etc.
Todd is a blustering coke-snorting ass who just can't find enough excitement to keep going and Stuart is a whipped man in a business suit who gets dragged along for all the rides that end in gonorrhea. The fact that both of these actors were on Desperate Housewives really adds a lot to their characters--a certain desperation to get the hell out of the cul-de-sac and do something else with their lives.
Meanwhile, the girls are having quite a time walking around the old town, getting spit on by the street urchins, and generally enjoying all the sights and sounds of central Europe. At the festival Whitney hooks up with a dubious looking guy named Miroslav (Stanislav Ianevski). You might recognize this guy as Victor Krum from the Harry Potter films. The degree of suspicion we are expected to have for this character is an interesting play on the xenophobic paranoia we got from the first film.
We also learn at the festival the important fact that Beth is a rich heiress. She is so rich, that she gives her father an allowance instead of the other way around. Beth has a creepy time at the festival as she is approached by a local who asks her to dance and when she refuses he says he "could have helped" her. Then the desk clerk shows up to ask Beth what the guy said to her and it's a credit to Beth that she is alert enough to lie to the desk clerk. Also, Stuart (who has arrived in town) shows up to get a closer look at the girl he's going to kill. Apparently Beth is a dead ringer for Stuart's emasculating wife.
Meanwhile, Whitney decides to get Lorna drunk because she thinks that Lorna is a stick in the mud. It turns out that Lorna is on some serious meds that react rather poorly to alchohol. While this doesn't lead to any medical consequences it does lead to Lorna making the bad decision to take a boat ride with a local guy.
Next thing she knows she's stark naked and hanging upside down from a chain in a torture chamber/bath. This is not exactly the spa treatment she was expecting.
Lorna's killing is the nastiest, most sexualized part of this film. Lorna's killer Mrs. Bathory (Monika Malacova) strips off and takes a scythe to Lorna so she can bathe in the girls fresh blood. Yes, this is a nasty piece of business but it is also a reference to the infamous "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Bathory who allegedly murdered young girls and bathed in virgins' blood to stay forever young. So, at least it's a literate reference, even if it's quite disturbing. The aesthetics of the blood bath, though, are quite good. There are some excellent scenic, lighting and effects choices here and because we are invested in Lorna the whole thing is quite disturbing.
The next morning Whitney gets snatched from the spa and Beth tries to make a run for it. Beth makes it all the way into the forest where she is confronted by the street kids. She is then rescued by Axelle, who shows up with Sasha. Sasha then makes the kids choose one from among them to die and the kids all gang up and push one of their own forward as a sacrifice for Sasha to shoot. Sasha is not to be screwed with.
Beth winds up at Sasha's villa, which has a pair of stone hunting hounds in front of the door and a full length portrait of Axelle on the staircase. Beth later spies a set of pictures including Axelle and a creepy guy from the train (as well as a group shot of Axelle, Alex, Natalya and Svetlana). Beth tries to make a second break for it when she realizes what Axelle and Sasha are up to, but she doesn't get anywhere.
Then there's the scene that is truly a work of art. It's a lengthy scene from the moment Stuart and Todd get the call that their girls are ready and follows them as they walk through the process and choose their implements of killing and torture and then enter the chamber. The sequence has no dialogue, is scored with a magnificent piece of music and has some of the most artful cinematography I've seen in a while. It really is a gem hidden in this film and is worth seeing on its own for those too squeamish to deal with the rest of the film.
Anyhow, the rest of the film is about how Todd and Stuart invert their characters. Todd is having a hilarious time threatening Whitney with a circular saw while Stuart is scared and almost weepy with Beth. Stuart and Beth decide to escape, but when Beth says something emasculating to Stuart that reminds him of his wife, he clocks her and ties her back up again. Todd has a funny sequence where the cord on the saw is too short and then when the cord is finally long enough he's playing around when he accidently puts the saw into Whitney's head and it gets caught on her hair and cuts her up nastily but doesn't kill her. This actually sickens Todd. (Turns out he wasn't as tough as he thought he was.) He tries to leave but the place has strict rules (and even stricter security in the wake of Paxton's escape--again, it's all about consequences). The staff unleash the dogs on Todd and he is cut to pieces. This prompts the staff to try to make lemonade by having a special limited-time offer to the customers for finishing off Whitney. This is where we get a cameo from Ruggero Deodato, the director of the infamous Cannibal Holocaust as...a cannibal who is enjoying a meal made of strips of flesh taken off of the still somewhat living Miroslav. When Stuart is shown the picture it cements his new attitude and he goes off to kill Whitney. We never see what he does and how he does it (again, this film is more restrained than its reputation) and when he comes back he looks like a different person, a harder, colder man.
But Beth won't give up. She lures Stuart with sex (trying to get him to sympathize with her because she's not his wife and can maybe make up for what his wife has done to him.) Stuart (like a lot of men) falls for it and Beth gets the drop on him. She proceeds to beat the crap out of him to get the code to the door. But the security system for the facility is now pretty airtight and they come through the door to find her holding a pistol in the direction of the door and a pair of shears to Stuart's genitals. It looks like it's curtains for the girl and Stuart says so. But, Beth is rich and Stuart has a mortgage and kids in expensive schools and this film is not so much about gender roles as it is about class and fiscal power. Stuart can't buy his way out of this situation, but Beth can and she does. All she has to do is to obey the rules of the facility--she has to kill someone and she has to get a tattoo. So, she cuts off Stuart's junk and tosses it to the dogs and walks over to get her tattoo and make the financial arrangements. Money is power. That's the ultimate lesson of this film. If you have the money then you can hold someone's life in your hands. Sure, there is coercive power and institutional power (like Elite Hunting's rules) but in the end what really empowers Beth and saves her compared to her friends is not so much a mystical character trait or a value (virginity, intelligence, humanity or anything of the sort) it is raw financial power and the intelligence to know that she can use it to bargain.
And once Beth is able to reassert he power she makes one final gesture by paying off the street kids to lure Axelle out into the forest where Beth decapitates her. The film ends with some happy European folk music while the little urchins play soccer with Axelle's head. It's the simple pleasures that are sometimes the best ones.
As gruesome as this film gets (and it is gruesome all along the way) it is also a great story with a real hard-edged cynical message at its core which is gratifyingly realistic. This film has a lot going for it and it is certainly better than the films it regularly gets lopped together with in the torture-porn subgenre. This film deserves better than that and I have to say that it made me respect Eli Roth as a storyteller.
On the other hand, it's kind of depressing to think that money can in fact buy your way out of all kinds of trouble. Them's that have it can even survive a horror movie torture chamber. Them's that don't--well, we've seen plenty of what happens to them's that don't.
On a sidenote, I have to mention that Inya, the woman who runs the operations at Elite Hunting in this film is played by Zuzana Geislerova who played the Reverend Mother in the film adaptation of Children of Dune.
Special Features
Previews
1. Coming to Blu-Ray
Look, it's Will Ferrell in high definition. Just what you've always wanted. Sure, floating cars would have been nice, but Will Ferrell in hi-def right in your own home? That's so much better.
2. 30 Days of Night
This is a pretty good trailer with very nice pacing and tone. And it's nice to go back and see uncharming vampires in action.
3. Boogeyman 2
Boogeyman 2: Electric Boogeymanaloo seems to be a cross between Nightmare on Elm Street and The Haunting.
4. Rise: Blood Hunter
Lucy Liu wants revenge for being turned into a vampire. In the sequel she gets revenge on her agent for getting her this role.
5. Resident Evil: Extinction
I'm beginning to get as annoyed by the Title-Colon-Subtitle style of titles as I am of numbered titles. Those Clint Eastwood orangutan movies didn't need numbers or colons and whatnot to get the point across that they were related.
6. Kaw
That's the sound that the evil birds make just before they pluck your eyes out for being tempted to see this movie.
7. Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud
I am so far out of the loop that I never even knew there was a first Pumpkinhead, much less that the whole thing had devolved into a retelling of the Hatfield/McCoy feud.
8. Fearnet.Com
For those people who want to take a break from playing Farmville.
Commentaries
1. Commentary with Eli Roth
Another pretty decent lesson in filmmaking with Eli Roth. Again he comes across as an intelligent filmmaker whose ideas are worth a listen.
2. Commentary with Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino and Gabriel Roth
It's sometimes a bit tiring to listen to Quentin Tarantino watch a film but he does get the conversation rolling pretty well and Eli Roth and his brother Gabriel have a lot of good anecdotes to share and it's a good insight into the process and ideas behind this film.
3. Commentary with Eli Roth, Lauren German, Vera Jordanova and Richard Burgi
This track is still somewhat along the lines of the talk show format that was on Hostel I, but at least whenever someone is added to the commentary they stay on and converse with the next group. Richard Burgi and Lauren German are really great commentators and worth a chuckle or two.
Deleted Scenes
1. The Trash Man
This is a continuation of the scene after Jordan Ladd discovers Paxton's head and she is caught in the kitchen by a guy with a chainsaw. It does answer the question of what happens to Paxton's girlfriend.
2. Whitney's Sketch
"One of the main complaints I heard from female Hostel fans was that there was too much female nudity, which I never really saw as a problem. So I figured I'd start off the sequel with a lingering cock shot just to balance things out. Happy now?"
Jeez, Eli, you don't have to sound so angry and defensive about throwing in a lingering cock shot. I'm angry just having to know that the phrase "lingering cock shot" exists. Lingering cock shot. It's an addictive set of words. At any rate, Whitney's sketch is a closeup of the aforementioned cock (and, let's not forget the nutsack accessory that goes with it.) You have to admire Whitney's concentration of efforts.
3. Whitney's Rant
Whitney ranting about Lorna.
Her idea of a good time is like going to the museum or like taking a hot bath and masturbating to the Brothers Karamazov while listening to sadcore.
Replace the Dostoyevsky with Tolstory and I'd call that a great way to spend a Thursday night.
4. The Plants
Evil girls in the hostel watching Pulp Fiction. Gives away a little too much about just how big the evil operation is.
5. The Van
You should never take a ride from a bunch of Eastern Europeans in a van. Even these girls know better than that. Best line goes to Whitney: "My barf tastes cidery."
6. Rape Shower
Drunk girls making fun of the After School Special where a girl is in a shower and crying. A bit tacky. It does have an element of horror karma to it when the girls are put through something a lot worse. Rape Shower is probably the worst title for anything I've ever seen (and I'm including Lingering Cock Shot in this equation.)
7. The Tool Checkout Room
I like the shopping spree aspect of this scene and how it develops the characters of the would-be killers in their browsing of the instruments of torture, but the montage scene is such great cinema that I can't argue with the choice to cut this fun dialogue out.
8. The Changing Room
Nervous jokes as the guys get ready to get changed into the killing outfits.
9. "This Is It"
Another nervous moment before the guys go into their killing chambers. Again, the montage is so much better.
10. Nozdrovia
Beth has a drink with Sasha at the conclusion of their business. This is where Beth discovers that Sasha is related to Axelle. It ends with Beth being forced to get the tattoo, but the manhandling undercuts the monetary exchange which guarantees her safety and her release after she kills Stuart and we really don't need to know the precise relationship between Sasha and Axelle to know that it's close and the way the film stands you get a sense that once she's paid and killed Sasha and the rest of the Elite Hunting crew are downright friendly, and this scene sort of continues to give them menace when it's more interesting that they aren't menacing anymore when she's getting the tattoo without this scene.
Hostel Part II: The Next Level
A friendly behind the scenes look at the complete process of making the film. Again, I think these are useful not just as a means of learning about filmmaking but also as a way of demystifying the images of the film itself. There's something reassuring about watching actors in a make-up chair getting gore put on them.
The end of this piece does raise the question of the relationship of the behind the scenes documentary crew and the film crew itself given the number of angry glares tossed toward the camera.
The Art of KNB EFX
This feels almost like an extended advertisement/testimonial for KNB. They obviously do good work. They win bonus points for guiding you through the peocess of making the dog food/gelatin genitals that get tossed to the dog at the end of the film.
Production Design
This is a brief look at the construction of the sets for the train, the look of the village festival masks and the chamber of horrors, which is a more extensive facility this time around.
Hostel Part II: A Legacy of Torture
"Plato said it best when he said that the good dream about what the bad do." Dr. Sheldon Roth
This is an interesting beginning of a discussion about the ideas and social commentary in this film (including comments by Eli Roth's parents) and then it goes into a history of torture and representations of torture as well as an introduction to the Italian giallo legends involved in this film.
Blood & Guts Gag Reel
All horror films should include a blooper reel. It really helps take the edge off. And those dogs are just so cute.
"The Treatment" Radio Interview with Eli Roth and Elvis Mitchell
I like discussions of film, but Elvis Mitchell is no Terry Gross, He starts off by saying that this film is more personal and less social commentary than the first Hostel. Really? Still, it's nice to hear someone who can talk about film in a more thoughtful way than Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Hostile
Hostel (2005)
Directed by Eli Roth, Screenplay by Eli Roth
I can't believe I'm going to defend Hostel because for the longest time I resisted seeing this film because of how I feel about the very idea of "torture porn" and because it didn't seem on face value to be much more than another misogynistic gorefest with the added bonus of xenophobia thrown in for some variety.
Curiosity, though, led me to stumble into seeing parts of Hostel, Part II and then later going back and seeing the first part to make sense of what I was seeing.
What I got was a gorefest with some misogyny and a large chunk of xenophobia thrown in. I also got a surprise, because somewhere in there was a well-made and thoughtful film. Granted, if you sit through a film once and then listen through four commentaries a certain Stockholm Syndrome (or Bratislava Syndrome) sets in. But at the very least Hostel is interesting enough to warrant some discussion and more arguments.
Somewhere in Hostel is a thought that equates paying for a person to provide pleasure (i.e. prostitution) with paying to cause pain to a person or, even, to kill a person.
And somewhere on top of that we who watch the fictionalization of these things are implicated in the business of pain entertainment.
The problem with Hostel is that it’s very difficult to critique a thing by showing the very same thing, which I suppose is the conundrum of attempting to introduce a peculiar kind of societal critique while reveling in gore. And this is the tension that animates Hostel--it exploits the desire to see sex and violence and explicit recreations of gore while it carries a criticism of the thing we're watching. Maybe the best explanation is that Eli Roth seems to want to express disgust with the idea that people would pay to torture and kill other people but considers the fictionalization of such things to be pretty cool and relatively harmless.
So here's the setup: three mooks are having adventures in Amsterdam. The two Americans are clearly doing a summer in Europe kind of thing and somewhere along the line they picked up an Icelandic Eurotrash guy to make things even wilder. Paxton (Jay Hernandez) seems to be the asshole of the bunch. Josh (Derek Richardson) is the nice guy who won't stop talking about his ex-girlfriend who cheated on him and dumped his sorry ass. And Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) is the self-styled "King of the Swing" and instigator of mad activities. Our American ambassadors of freedom and hope (and Icelandic sidekick) are already bored with the hash bars and now they're looking for fun of the female variety. First they hit up the club scene, where Josh wears a fanny pack (containing all their important documents) thus preventing him and Paxton from getting laid. Oli, meanwhile has already texted pictures of himself having sex with a girl in the club's bathroom. This is the point at which I already don't care if Oli lives or dies because while I'm sure that the drunk girl (who knows, maybe she's sober) in the bathroom consented to get rear ended by an older Icelandic man in a cramped toilet I'm pretty sure she didn't expect to have that moment memorialized in a photograph to be shared with every backpacking foreigner in Europe.
The wonder boys then get kicked out of the club because Josh ends up in a fight with a long-haired Legolas lookalike. At this point the boys begin to use the adjective "Israeli" to describe how kickass they are. This is an adjective which I can only imagine is one more Lebanese fiasco from fading out of fashion the way that "French" and "menacing" were decoupled after Waterloo.
At any rate, now they really need to get Josh laid so they head to the famous Red Light District where they do some window shopping and then Oli pays for the three of them to have some fun. Josh and Oli double team a prostitute (in tasteless, but cinematically brilliant silhouette) while Josh wanders from room to room in the brothel. He hears some loud noises and, feeling chivalrous, opens a door into a bondage room where he is told that if he plans on staying he'd better be paying. The important lesson here is that if you're in a brothel and hear someone being whipped, just keep moving. Josh ends up in a room with a hooker with a heart of gold who talks to him fairly gently and then when she's looking the other way he just leaves. At this point I regained some sympathy for Oli who paid good money for a Dutch prostitute that Josh wasted without even offering to pay him back--or even admitting that he didn't do anything. So far, the film is pretty much a standard European student tourist adventure film.
But then our boys are locked out of their hostel because they've made it back past curfew which sparks a street battle with angry Dutch neighbors. Finally, they climb their way back in through the hostel window with the help of a friendly Slav named Alex (Lubomir Bukovy). Now, this is where things start going awry, because they come back to the hostel and there's a couple doing it in the back of the room while everyone else is casually conversing. This is the equivalent of wading in water nonchalantly while sharks bump into your leg. At a certain point in life you really have to make the choice to find somewhere else to be. Me, I'd go into another room. Alex, Josh and Paxton just sit and have a conversation. Oli sits on the bunkbed next to the copulating couple. None of these people is a reasonable human being.
Then Alex suggests that if our crew is looking for some gin-y then Barcelona is played out and where they should go is to Slovakia where he knows a hostel swimming in local women. To prove his point he pulls out his digital camera and shows off a bunch of pictures of himself having sex with some attractive women. This is the point at which I would have to say, "Thank you, mole-face (I forgot to mention that Alex has a distracting mole on his face) for your help in getting back in to the hostel but I have no desire to have sex with anyone who would go near you and your ugly mole." Instead, Alex spins a yarn about how Slovakia is aching for foreign penises since all their men were killed in the war. And this is the point at which whatever respect you might have had left for these men should disappear because none of them says "which war?" Not even the Icelandic dude. This would be the part where one might suggest that a summer spent backpacking across Europe will do nothing for increasing an American's knowledge about the world. (This bit is nicely counterpointed by a moment in Hostel Part II.)
Now, there are turning points in every life. And like I said, this is the part at which a reasonable person would look at Alex's picture, then look at his mole face, then look at Oli and the randy naked couple in the bunkbed and then calmly ask how he let things get this far and then, just as calmly, pick up a brick and bash his own head in.
But not Josh, Paxton and Oli. Nope, they're on the train for Bratislava where they meet a nice Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasak) who eats some meat covered salad with his hand and then proceeds to put his hand on Josh's leg prompting a quite understandable bit of homophobic hysteria. The Dutch guy and Oli show each other pictures of their daughters. This is when we learn that A) murderers have children that they love and B) Oli is way too old to be running around Europe with a bunch of American students. I have to say that this scene is one of the things to admire about this film because the Dutch guy later does some horrible things, and when we see that we have to remember that he has a family and he's not some sort of supernatural slasher lurking in the woods waiting to kill promiscuous teenagers. And that's the thing that makes this film that much more disgusting, because it's about ordinary folks who save up money to go and murder other ordinary folks.
Anyhow, the boys arrive in Slovakia to find the place a mixture of picturesque old architecture and decrepit abandoned industrial wasteland. But then they get to the hostel, which looks more like an abandoned chateau where the smiling idiot desk clerk (Milda Havlas) greets them with too much friendliness and then sends them up to their room which they discover that their roommates are a pair of hot women who invite them to the sauna. This is where you learn the most important life lesson of this film. If something seems too good to be true, then it is too good to be true. (The corollary to this is that the worst horror you can imagine is probably not as bad as the worst thing someone else is actually doing.) And while the whole atmosphere of the sauna seems to ooze friendliness and loose behavior, sane people should always have a puritanical streak in the back of their heads that should say, "yeah, but how much is this going to cost me?" I mean, it's all good and well to believe that people somewhere in the world are more comfortable sharing their sexuality freely, but still...you have to have a peculiarly American combination of naivete and arrogance to assume that you're going to roll into nowheresville and find the world's most attractive women throwing themselves at you.
Now, we're a good way into this movie and nobody has been killed and we haven't even caught a hint of violence. (Except for the bit where Oli shows off the face he's drawn on his buttcheeks--which did violence to my eyes.)
The boys head out to the bar with their super-friendly acquaintances Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova). Oli hits it off with a girl from the hostel front desk, Vala (Jana Havlickova) and he shows everyone his swing dance moves, thus proving that his self-styled nickname actually was in fact an unimaginative and quite accurate description of his preferred method of dancing. But say what you will for Oli, at least you can believe that Vala would actually dig him in some way. I mean, you're working a crap job at a hostel in Slovakia and some Icelandic dude rolls in and can swing dance and is kind of funny (give or take) and also knows some old timey Russian tunes and has a decent singing voice. And while Paxton is an asshole, I have ceased to be surprised even in real life when a moderately attractive asshole manages to make time with an attractive woman. But the alarm bells should go out when Josh does everything he can to make sure he shouldn't be getting any and still doesn't repel his "date." He won't stop talking about his ex-girlfriend. He leaves the girl to go talk to the Dutch guy from the train and apologize for being such a homophobe and even puts his hand on the Dutch guy's knee. At this point there is no earthly way that any woman would be attracted to Josh. But Natalya and Svetlana are obviously bait--really attractive bait. There's a chilling moment during the subsequent encounter when Natalya and Svetlana just look at each other that tells you everything. Whatever pleasure they may or may not be getting is pointless. They're doing a job. Is it an exercise in misogyny to create a story where women are nothing more than bait? Maybe. But something to keep in mind is that we meet another pair of victims in the lobby of the hostel--two Asian girls. They certainly weren't lured in by the promise of desperate Natashas. I'd like to know how they ended up there. (Hostel Part II goes a long way toward explaining it.) At any rate, it shows a certain depth that it's not simply a matter of women luring men to this hostel. It's foreigners in general who are the problem.
So the dream night ends and when they wake up Oli is nowhere to be found and now the whole tone of the film moves into dark nightmare territory. Keep in mind, that at this point we're nearly halfway done with the film and still haven't seen an act of violence. Josh and Paxton go looking for Oli and end up in a museum of torture implements. Nothing bad actually happens there but they do see someone walking around in Oli's parka. Now they're creeped out. Kana (Jennifer Lim) shows the boys a texted picture of Oli and her friend Yuki (Keiko Seiko) which the guys find strange given Oli's expressed dislike of Asian girls. Paxton and Josh are freaking out and now the only thing missing is "People Are Strange" playing in the background to complete the picture. The first gruesome thing we get is a shot of Oli's detached head on a spike. And now we know what's up. The hunt is on and the quarry is on alert but still unaware of the scale of the threat.
And to make the whole place that much creepier we are treated to a bunch of little street kids demanding gum. Even the kids are menacing.
So it turns out the hostel was just a funnel to get young, relatively attractive people into the torture chambers where people pay good money (to Elite Hunting) to kill someone in elaborate ways at their own leisure. The glimpses we are shown are quite enough to establish the horror show going on there. Still, Roth leaves something to the imagination. Sure, he shows us a guy about to sever Yuki's toes, but instead of showing it he cuts over to Kana clipping her toenails. Despite the well-earned reputation for making explicit gore, Roth knows that sometimes the imagination fills in a horror show quite well enough.
Anyhow, just when you think that Josh is the most likely to survive, he disappears. Paxton is left running around town trying to track down Josh, who we next see in a torture chamber at the mercy of the Dutch guy from the train. The Dutch guy wanted to be surgeon, but he's got shaky hands so he's going to live out his dream by cutting open Josh. It's like Fantasy Island for sick sick people. Needless to say, it's too late for Josh. He's not going to make it out alive. Sorry kids, but sometimes nice guys do finish last.
Paxton, meanwhile, goes to the police who creep him out with their pointed lack of helpfulness. When he goes back to the hostel there are new girls who look like the old ones. When he finally tracks down Natalya and Svetlana they look like strung out heroin junkies--which makes sense given their day jobs. Natalya takes Paxton to the "Art Gallery" which is an abandoned warehouse/torture chamber. From here on out it's all about Paxton trying to escape, and in doing so revealing more and more about the operation of the place.
In a ludicrously violent scene Paxton loses several fingers to a guy with a chainsaw who then slips on some blood and cuts his own leg off and dies. This is how Paxton manages to escape. He hides for a while in a cart full of body parts that is taken to an incinerator by a hunchback. (You can't have an underground murder tourism operation without a helpful hunchback.) In the cart Paxton sees the remnants of Josh.
Takashi Miike, the Japanese director of films that would make you cringe, vomit and cringe again makes a cameo as a satisfied customer on his way home. (He is credited as playing himself, which I presume means that if there really was a place where you could pay to murder people Takashi Miike would pony up the yen to try it out?) And, just to reduce the xenophobic aspect of the situation, we meet another customer, a genuine American asshole with money. Paxton ends up shooting the guy. He also manages to rescue Kana, who unfortunately has had a blowtorch applied to her face and now has an eyeball dangling out which Paxton helpfully cuts off. This is by far the nastiest piece of work in the whole film. Now it's all about making good the escape. Paxton steals a car and heads into the city, where he sees Natalya, Svetlana and Alex the moleface standing in the middle of the street. He guns the car into them killing Svetlana and Alex instantly and when Natalya tries to get up she is finished off by the car that is chasing Paxton. As if this bit of revenge fantasy isn't enough Paxton then manages to find a bag of gum in the car which buys him the support of the street kids who proceed to ambush and stone the chase car, caving in the heads of the thugs with cobblestones and bricks in the process. Paxton and Kana make it all the way to the train station where Kana sees her reflection and jumps in front of a train. She does this, presumably, because she doesn't consider life worth living if she looks like that (and only has one eye, to boot). The question is: does she do this out of shock? Or is it an indication of the value she as a person places on her appearance? It's easy enough for Paxton to be shocked because his missing fingers will presumably not destroy his life.
At any rate, Paxton makes it onto the train and gets out of Slovakia only to see the Dutch guy in a train station further down the line. He follows the guy into the bathroom and proceeds to give him a swirly and cut his throat.
So, for all the legendary torture and blood in this film it was for the most part a long story about exploitation (wrapped in an exploitative package) which turns into an action escape story at the end with a big dose of revenge thrown in. While the gross parts are very gross they are put into some serious context (where all of the violence has lasting consequences) the overall effect was of a good ghastly story. It certainly wasn't the useless gratuitous film I was expecting to see. For those who think that any representation of violence breeds more violence, then maybe the problem is that making a good film where such violence is necessary to the story only opens the floodgates for more violence and constant escalation. The thing is, that while you can see that the filmmakers had fun creating the physical representations of the violence, you also have to admit that it's layered into a pretty thoughtful bit of storytelling. If every film like this was this well done then maybe this subgenre would be better. As it is, Hostel stands out as being a good film in a bad genre. As for those people who would watch such a film and really enjoy the gore and the torture--well, it's like trying to pin the blame for alcoholism down. Sure, without distillers there'd be no alcohol, but there'd still be people looking to get drunk out there. I don't enjoy torture porn, but I'm reassured by my distaste for and disgust at it. On the other hand, I can't deny that this is a good story. The contradiction there is something to think about.
Bonus Features
Commentaries
You have to be a serious cinephile to sit through 4 commentaries on any film, even if you really love it. I have to admire Eli Roth's dedication to his craft and the seriousness with which he takes his films that he bothers to put so much effort into explaining his films in so many commentaries. I know there is a school of thought that says that no film should require so much explaining--you either do it in the film or you don't. But I suppose there's something to be said for footnotes and scholia and commentary and frankly I am impressed with Roth's commentaries so I feel like I should make special mention of them as being integral to the appreciation of this film.
1. Eli Roth with Executive Producers Quentin Tarantino, Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel
In this commentary Roth explains how after the success of Cabin Fever he was at a career crossroads where he wasn't sure if he wanted to be known solely for horror films, but ultimately decided that he was okay with that to some extent because he wanted to make films he would like to see and that if that meant the industry would pigeon-hole him as "that guy" then so be it. Thus came Hostel, which Tarantino thought was Roth's opportunity to make his Miike film. I'm not sure why anybody would need to make their own Miike film, but there you have it. This commentary solidified my feelings about Quentin Tarantino (he comes off as more than a bit of an ass, personally, with somewhat distasteful appetites, but he does know a lot about films and he is quite supportive of Roth, which is very generous on his part). Roth comes off as intelligent and earnest. All in all, this is an interesting round-table on the ideas contained in the film and the origin of the project itself. It's not a bad crew to have doing commentary on other people's films, frankly.
2. Eli Roth with Barbara Nedeljakova, Eythor Gudjonsson, Editor George Folsey Jr. and Web Author Harry Knowles
Okay, this is one of those annoying talk-show style commentaries where the guests keep rotating out and Eli Roth is the host. While this gives people a chance to talk about their experiences without so much interruption as you get in a mass group commentary it ends up being disconnected from the film itself and you lose the sense of watching the film with the people doing the commentary. This is especially true with Harry Knowles who has a phone conversation with Eli Roth in this commentary. What is this, a call-in show? Important knowledge gleaned here: sniper (pronounced sneepur) is Icelandic for clitoris. Harry Knowles is brought in as a thank you for being so instrumental in creating the buzz around Cabin Fever. So if you hate Eli Roth movies you can blame Harry Knowles. This does raise the question of just how much power in shaping taste is vested in a few people like Harry Knowles who can control the bully pulpit in favor or against a given thing. At any rate, if you're going to do a talk-show commentary you should at least observe some of the forms by having an opening monologue and musical guests.
3. Eli Roth, Producer Chris Briggs & Documentarian Gabriel Roth
A pretty decent commentary. I like that Eli Roth gets his whole family involved. We learn a lot about the goings on in Central Europe and we get a sense of just how constrictive it is making a film of any size in the US with the production unions--which nearly crippled Cabin Fever. Thus, a lot of Hostel was determined by Roth wanting to make a film outside of the US and away from those pesky unions.
4. Director Commentary w/Eli Roth
This commentary is especially useful for filmmakers. It's essentially a continuation of Roth's Cabin Fever director solo commentary (which was Eli Roth's Guide to Filmmaking 101.) You can think of this one as Eli Roth's Guide to Filmmaking 102. Personally, I'm enjoying taking the Eli Roth Film Tele-course.
Hostel Dissected: Part 1
Pre-Production
There are some great shots of Prague here. (And look, the Gastrocentrum is catered by Aramark.) I don't know which I like more, the shots of Prague or the backstage shots of the effects which help demystify the violence. This is a very detailed and instructive look into the making of the film. Cesky Krumlov is a fantastic town.
Part 2
The production itself. Again, it's really great to see how the effects gags work. And we get to see Eli Roth's parents on the set. Also, there are porn stars.
Part 3
More production fun and the alternate ending and then the post-production fun begins.
Combined with the commentaries, Hostel Dissected is a great primer on the making of a film.
Kill the Car! (Multi-Angle)
By far the coolest of the special features, it allows you to use the "angle" button on your remote to cycle through 3 different camera angles of the scene where the street kids destroy the car. This can provide for hours of endless fun for the whole family.
Previews
1. When a Stranger Calls
When the stranger calls ask him to see this movie and then let me know how it was.
2. Silent Hill
If I drove into an abandoned mining town and found a copy of this movie lying around in an abandoned Woolworths then maybe I'll see it.
3. Underworld: Evolution
You can't get enough Kate Beckinsale. This is literally true.
4. The Cave
Based on the story by Plato, this film was part of the onslaught of evil cave movies from a few years back.
5. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
You'd hardly know that actually this is a courtroom drama. That scene in the classroom where everyone's face turns evil gets me every time.
6. Boogeyman
I sometimes get the suspicion that this film might have some signigicant insight into the idea of unresolved issues from childhood, but I just can't bring myself to pick up a copy of a movie called Boogeyman and watch it.
7. Ring Around the Rosie
Why is it that the mirror gag always works in horror films? I'm almost curious enough to see this one to find out what it's all about, but I have the same issue with making the effort that I have with Boogeyman.
8. The Fog
Maybe that remake of The Fog wasn't as lame as I remembered it, but then again maybe it was.
Directed by Eli Roth, Screenplay by Eli Roth
I can't believe I'm going to defend Hostel because for the longest time I resisted seeing this film because of how I feel about the very idea of "torture porn" and because it didn't seem on face value to be much more than another misogynistic gorefest with the added bonus of xenophobia thrown in for some variety.
Curiosity, though, led me to stumble into seeing parts of Hostel, Part II and then later going back and seeing the first part to make sense of what I was seeing.
What I got was a gorefest with some misogyny and a large chunk of xenophobia thrown in. I also got a surprise, because somewhere in there was a well-made and thoughtful film. Granted, if you sit through a film once and then listen through four commentaries a certain Stockholm Syndrome (or Bratislava Syndrome) sets in. But at the very least Hostel is interesting enough to warrant some discussion and more arguments.
Somewhere in Hostel is a thought that equates paying for a person to provide pleasure (i.e. prostitution) with paying to cause pain to a person or, even, to kill a person.
And somewhere on top of that we who watch the fictionalization of these things are implicated in the business of pain entertainment.
The problem with Hostel is that it’s very difficult to critique a thing by showing the very same thing, which I suppose is the conundrum of attempting to introduce a peculiar kind of societal critique while reveling in gore. And this is the tension that animates Hostel--it exploits the desire to see sex and violence and explicit recreations of gore while it carries a criticism of the thing we're watching. Maybe the best explanation is that Eli Roth seems to want to express disgust with the idea that people would pay to torture and kill other people but considers the fictionalization of such things to be pretty cool and relatively harmless.
So here's the setup: three mooks are having adventures in Amsterdam. The two Americans are clearly doing a summer in Europe kind of thing and somewhere along the line they picked up an Icelandic Eurotrash guy to make things even wilder. Paxton (Jay Hernandez) seems to be the asshole of the bunch. Josh (Derek Richardson) is the nice guy who won't stop talking about his ex-girlfriend who cheated on him and dumped his sorry ass. And Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) is the self-styled "King of the Swing" and instigator of mad activities. Our American ambassadors of freedom and hope (and Icelandic sidekick) are already bored with the hash bars and now they're looking for fun of the female variety. First they hit up the club scene, where Josh wears a fanny pack (containing all their important documents) thus preventing him and Paxton from getting laid. Oli, meanwhile has already texted pictures of himself having sex with a girl in the club's bathroom. This is the point at which I already don't care if Oli lives or dies because while I'm sure that the drunk girl (who knows, maybe she's sober) in the bathroom consented to get rear ended by an older Icelandic man in a cramped toilet I'm pretty sure she didn't expect to have that moment memorialized in a photograph to be shared with every backpacking foreigner in Europe.
The wonder boys then get kicked out of the club because Josh ends up in a fight with a long-haired Legolas lookalike. At this point the boys begin to use the adjective "Israeli" to describe how kickass they are. This is an adjective which I can only imagine is one more Lebanese fiasco from fading out of fashion the way that "French" and "menacing" were decoupled after Waterloo.
At any rate, now they really need to get Josh laid so they head to the famous Red Light District where they do some window shopping and then Oli pays for the three of them to have some fun. Josh and Oli double team a prostitute (in tasteless, but cinematically brilliant silhouette) while Josh wanders from room to room in the brothel. He hears some loud noises and, feeling chivalrous, opens a door into a bondage room where he is told that if he plans on staying he'd better be paying. The important lesson here is that if you're in a brothel and hear someone being whipped, just keep moving. Josh ends up in a room with a hooker with a heart of gold who talks to him fairly gently and then when she's looking the other way he just leaves. At this point I regained some sympathy for Oli who paid good money for a Dutch prostitute that Josh wasted without even offering to pay him back--or even admitting that he didn't do anything. So far, the film is pretty much a standard European student tourist adventure film.
But then our boys are locked out of their hostel because they've made it back past curfew which sparks a street battle with angry Dutch neighbors. Finally, they climb their way back in through the hostel window with the help of a friendly Slav named Alex (Lubomir Bukovy). Now, this is where things start going awry, because they come back to the hostel and there's a couple doing it in the back of the room while everyone else is casually conversing. This is the equivalent of wading in water nonchalantly while sharks bump into your leg. At a certain point in life you really have to make the choice to find somewhere else to be. Me, I'd go into another room. Alex, Josh and Paxton just sit and have a conversation. Oli sits on the bunkbed next to the copulating couple. None of these people is a reasonable human being.
Then Alex suggests that if our crew is looking for some gin-y then Barcelona is played out and where they should go is to Slovakia where he knows a hostel swimming in local women. To prove his point he pulls out his digital camera and shows off a bunch of pictures of himself having sex with some attractive women. This is the point at which I would have to say, "Thank you, mole-face (I forgot to mention that Alex has a distracting mole on his face) for your help in getting back in to the hostel but I have no desire to have sex with anyone who would go near you and your ugly mole." Instead, Alex spins a yarn about how Slovakia is aching for foreign penises since all their men were killed in the war. And this is the point at which whatever respect you might have had left for these men should disappear because none of them says "which war?" Not even the Icelandic dude. This would be the part where one might suggest that a summer spent backpacking across Europe will do nothing for increasing an American's knowledge about the world. (This bit is nicely counterpointed by a moment in Hostel Part II.)
Now, there are turning points in every life. And like I said, this is the part at which a reasonable person would look at Alex's picture, then look at his mole face, then look at Oli and the randy naked couple in the bunkbed and then calmly ask how he let things get this far and then, just as calmly, pick up a brick and bash his own head in.
But not Josh, Paxton and Oli. Nope, they're on the train for Bratislava where they meet a nice Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasak) who eats some meat covered salad with his hand and then proceeds to put his hand on Josh's leg prompting a quite understandable bit of homophobic hysteria. The Dutch guy and Oli show each other pictures of their daughters. This is when we learn that A) murderers have children that they love and B) Oli is way too old to be running around Europe with a bunch of American students. I have to say that this scene is one of the things to admire about this film because the Dutch guy later does some horrible things, and when we see that we have to remember that he has a family and he's not some sort of supernatural slasher lurking in the woods waiting to kill promiscuous teenagers. And that's the thing that makes this film that much more disgusting, because it's about ordinary folks who save up money to go and murder other ordinary folks.
Anyhow, the boys arrive in Slovakia to find the place a mixture of picturesque old architecture and decrepit abandoned industrial wasteland. But then they get to the hostel, which looks more like an abandoned chateau where the smiling idiot desk clerk (Milda Havlas) greets them with too much friendliness and then sends them up to their room which they discover that their roommates are a pair of hot women who invite them to the sauna. This is where you learn the most important life lesson of this film. If something seems too good to be true, then it is too good to be true. (The corollary to this is that the worst horror you can imagine is probably not as bad as the worst thing someone else is actually doing.) And while the whole atmosphere of the sauna seems to ooze friendliness and loose behavior, sane people should always have a puritanical streak in the back of their heads that should say, "yeah, but how much is this going to cost me?" I mean, it's all good and well to believe that people somewhere in the world are more comfortable sharing their sexuality freely, but still...you have to have a peculiarly American combination of naivete and arrogance to assume that you're going to roll into nowheresville and find the world's most attractive women throwing themselves at you.
Now, we're a good way into this movie and nobody has been killed and we haven't even caught a hint of violence. (Except for the bit where Oli shows off the face he's drawn on his buttcheeks--which did violence to my eyes.)
The boys head out to the bar with their super-friendly acquaintances Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova). Oli hits it off with a girl from the hostel front desk, Vala (Jana Havlickova) and he shows everyone his swing dance moves, thus proving that his self-styled nickname actually was in fact an unimaginative and quite accurate description of his preferred method of dancing. But say what you will for Oli, at least you can believe that Vala would actually dig him in some way. I mean, you're working a crap job at a hostel in Slovakia and some Icelandic dude rolls in and can swing dance and is kind of funny (give or take) and also knows some old timey Russian tunes and has a decent singing voice. And while Paxton is an asshole, I have ceased to be surprised even in real life when a moderately attractive asshole manages to make time with an attractive woman. But the alarm bells should go out when Josh does everything he can to make sure he shouldn't be getting any and still doesn't repel his "date." He won't stop talking about his ex-girlfriend. He leaves the girl to go talk to the Dutch guy from the train and apologize for being such a homophobe and even puts his hand on the Dutch guy's knee. At this point there is no earthly way that any woman would be attracted to Josh. But Natalya and Svetlana are obviously bait--really attractive bait. There's a chilling moment during the subsequent encounter when Natalya and Svetlana just look at each other that tells you everything. Whatever pleasure they may or may not be getting is pointless. They're doing a job. Is it an exercise in misogyny to create a story where women are nothing more than bait? Maybe. But something to keep in mind is that we meet another pair of victims in the lobby of the hostel--two Asian girls. They certainly weren't lured in by the promise of desperate Natashas. I'd like to know how they ended up there. (Hostel Part II goes a long way toward explaining it.) At any rate, it shows a certain depth that it's not simply a matter of women luring men to this hostel. It's foreigners in general who are the problem.
So the dream night ends and when they wake up Oli is nowhere to be found and now the whole tone of the film moves into dark nightmare territory. Keep in mind, that at this point we're nearly halfway done with the film and still haven't seen an act of violence. Josh and Paxton go looking for Oli and end up in a museum of torture implements. Nothing bad actually happens there but they do see someone walking around in Oli's parka. Now they're creeped out. Kana (Jennifer Lim) shows the boys a texted picture of Oli and her friend Yuki (Keiko Seiko) which the guys find strange given Oli's expressed dislike of Asian girls. Paxton and Josh are freaking out and now the only thing missing is "People Are Strange" playing in the background to complete the picture. The first gruesome thing we get is a shot of Oli's detached head on a spike. And now we know what's up. The hunt is on and the quarry is on alert but still unaware of the scale of the threat.
And to make the whole place that much creepier we are treated to a bunch of little street kids demanding gum. Even the kids are menacing.
So it turns out the hostel was just a funnel to get young, relatively attractive people into the torture chambers where people pay good money (to Elite Hunting) to kill someone in elaborate ways at their own leisure. The glimpses we are shown are quite enough to establish the horror show going on there. Still, Roth leaves something to the imagination. Sure, he shows us a guy about to sever Yuki's toes, but instead of showing it he cuts over to Kana clipping her toenails. Despite the well-earned reputation for making explicit gore, Roth knows that sometimes the imagination fills in a horror show quite well enough.
Anyhow, just when you think that Josh is the most likely to survive, he disappears. Paxton is left running around town trying to track down Josh, who we next see in a torture chamber at the mercy of the Dutch guy from the train. The Dutch guy wanted to be surgeon, but he's got shaky hands so he's going to live out his dream by cutting open Josh. It's like Fantasy Island for sick sick people. Needless to say, it's too late for Josh. He's not going to make it out alive. Sorry kids, but sometimes nice guys do finish last.
Paxton, meanwhile, goes to the police who creep him out with their pointed lack of helpfulness. When he goes back to the hostel there are new girls who look like the old ones. When he finally tracks down Natalya and Svetlana they look like strung out heroin junkies--which makes sense given their day jobs. Natalya takes Paxton to the "Art Gallery" which is an abandoned warehouse/torture chamber. From here on out it's all about Paxton trying to escape, and in doing so revealing more and more about the operation of the place.
In a ludicrously violent scene Paxton loses several fingers to a guy with a chainsaw who then slips on some blood and cuts his own leg off and dies. This is how Paxton manages to escape. He hides for a while in a cart full of body parts that is taken to an incinerator by a hunchback. (You can't have an underground murder tourism operation without a helpful hunchback.) In the cart Paxton sees the remnants of Josh.
Takashi Miike, the Japanese director of films that would make you cringe, vomit and cringe again makes a cameo as a satisfied customer on his way home. (He is credited as playing himself, which I presume means that if there really was a place where you could pay to murder people Takashi Miike would pony up the yen to try it out?) And, just to reduce the xenophobic aspect of the situation, we meet another customer, a genuine American asshole with money. Paxton ends up shooting the guy. He also manages to rescue Kana, who unfortunately has had a blowtorch applied to her face and now has an eyeball dangling out which Paxton helpfully cuts off. This is by far the nastiest piece of work in the whole film. Now it's all about making good the escape. Paxton steals a car and heads into the city, where he sees Natalya, Svetlana and Alex the moleface standing in the middle of the street. He guns the car into them killing Svetlana and Alex instantly and when Natalya tries to get up she is finished off by the car that is chasing Paxton. As if this bit of revenge fantasy isn't enough Paxton then manages to find a bag of gum in the car which buys him the support of the street kids who proceed to ambush and stone the chase car, caving in the heads of the thugs with cobblestones and bricks in the process. Paxton and Kana make it all the way to the train station where Kana sees her reflection and jumps in front of a train. She does this, presumably, because she doesn't consider life worth living if she looks like that (and only has one eye, to boot). The question is: does she do this out of shock? Or is it an indication of the value she as a person places on her appearance? It's easy enough for Paxton to be shocked because his missing fingers will presumably not destroy his life.
At any rate, Paxton makes it onto the train and gets out of Slovakia only to see the Dutch guy in a train station further down the line. He follows the guy into the bathroom and proceeds to give him a swirly and cut his throat.
So, for all the legendary torture and blood in this film it was for the most part a long story about exploitation (wrapped in an exploitative package) which turns into an action escape story at the end with a big dose of revenge thrown in. While the gross parts are very gross they are put into some serious context (where all of the violence has lasting consequences) the overall effect was of a good ghastly story. It certainly wasn't the useless gratuitous film I was expecting to see. For those who think that any representation of violence breeds more violence, then maybe the problem is that making a good film where such violence is necessary to the story only opens the floodgates for more violence and constant escalation. The thing is, that while you can see that the filmmakers had fun creating the physical representations of the violence, you also have to admit that it's layered into a pretty thoughtful bit of storytelling. If every film like this was this well done then maybe this subgenre would be better. As it is, Hostel stands out as being a good film in a bad genre. As for those people who would watch such a film and really enjoy the gore and the torture--well, it's like trying to pin the blame for alcoholism down. Sure, without distillers there'd be no alcohol, but there'd still be people looking to get drunk out there. I don't enjoy torture porn, but I'm reassured by my distaste for and disgust at it. On the other hand, I can't deny that this is a good story. The contradiction there is something to think about.
Bonus Features
Commentaries
You have to be a serious cinephile to sit through 4 commentaries on any film, even if you really love it. I have to admire Eli Roth's dedication to his craft and the seriousness with which he takes his films that he bothers to put so much effort into explaining his films in so many commentaries. I know there is a school of thought that says that no film should require so much explaining--you either do it in the film or you don't. But I suppose there's something to be said for footnotes and scholia and commentary and frankly I am impressed with Roth's commentaries so I feel like I should make special mention of them as being integral to the appreciation of this film.
1. Eli Roth with Executive Producers Quentin Tarantino, Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel
In this commentary Roth explains how after the success of Cabin Fever he was at a career crossroads where he wasn't sure if he wanted to be known solely for horror films, but ultimately decided that he was okay with that to some extent because he wanted to make films he would like to see and that if that meant the industry would pigeon-hole him as "that guy" then so be it. Thus came Hostel, which Tarantino thought was Roth's opportunity to make his Miike film. I'm not sure why anybody would need to make their own Miike film, but there you have it. This commentary solidified my feelings about Quentin Tarantino (he comes off as more than a bit of an ass, personally, with somewhat distasteful appetites, but he does know a lot about films and he is quite supportive of Roth, which is very generous on his part). Roth comes off as intelligent and earnest. All in all, this is an interesting round-table on the ideas contained in the film and the origin of the project itself. It's not a bad crew to have doing commentary on other people's films, frankly.
2. Eli Roth with Barbara Nedeljakova, Eythor Gudjonsson, Editor George Folsey Jr. and Web Author Harry Knowles
Okay, this is one of those annoying talk-show style commentaries where the guests keep rotating out and Eli Roth is the host. While this gives people a chance to talk about their experiences without so much interruption as you get in a mass group commentary it ends up being disconnected from the film itself and you lose the sense of watching the film with the people doing the commentary. This is especially true with Harry Knowles who has a phone conversation with Eli Roth in this commentary. What is this, a call-in show? Important knowledge gleaned here: sniper (pronounced sneepur) is Icelandic for clitoris. Harry Knowles is brought in as a thank you for being so instrumental in creating the buzz around Cabin Fever. So if you hate Eli Roth movies you can blame Harry Knowles. This does raise the question of just how much power in shaping taste is vested in a few people like Harry Knowles who can control the bully pulpit in favor or against a given thing. At any rate, if you're going to do a talk-show commentary you should at least observe some of the forms by having an opening monologue and musical guests.
3. Eli Roth, Producer Chris Briggs & Documentarian Gabriel Roth
A pretty decent commentary. I like that Eli Roth gets his whole family involved. We learn a lot about the goings on in Central Europe and we get a sense of just how constrictive it is making a film of any size in the US with the production unions--which nearly crippled Cabin Fever. Thus, a lot of Hostel was determined by Roth wanting to make a film outside of the US and away from those pesky unions.
4. Director Commentary w/Eli Roth
This commentary is especially useful for filmmakers. It's essentially a continuation of Roth's Cabin Fever director solo commentary (which was Eli Roth's Guide to Filmmaking 101.) You can think of this one as Eli Roth's Guide to Filmmaking 102. Personally, I'm enjoying taking the Eli Roth Film Tele-course.
Hostel Dissected: Part 1
Pre-Production
There are some great shots of Prague here. (And look, the Gastrocentrum is catered by Aramark.) I don't know which I like more, the shots of Prague or the backstage shots of the effects which help demystify the violence. This is a very detailed and instructive look into the making of the film. Cesky Krumlov is a fantastic town.
Part 2
The production itself. Again, it's really great to see how the effects gags work. And we get to see Eli Roth's parents on the set. Also, there are porn stars.
Part 3
More production fun and the alternate ending and then the post-production fun begins.
Combined with the commentaries, Hostel Dissected is a great primer on the making of a film.
Kill the Car! (Multi-Angle)
By far the coolest of the special features, it allows you to use the "angle" button on your remote to cycle through 3 different camera angles of the scene where the street kids destroy the car. This can provide for hours of endless fun for the whole family.
Previews
1. When a Stranger Calls
When the stranger calls ask him to see this movie and then let me know how it was.
2. Silent Hill
If I drove into an abandoned mining town and found a copy of this movie lying around in an abandoned Woolworths then maybe I'll see it.
3. Underworld: Evolution
You can't get enough Kate Beckinsale. This is literally true.
4. The Cave
Based on the story by Plato, this film was part of the onslaught of evil cave movies from a few years back.
5. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
You'd hardly know that actually this is a courtroom drama. That scene in the classroom where everyone's face turns evil gets me every time.
6. Boogeyman
I sometimes get the suspicion that this film might have some signigicant insight into the idea of unresolved issues from childhood, but I just can't bring myself to pick up a copy of a movie called Boogeyman and watch it.
7. Ring Around the Rosie
Why is it that the mirror gag always works in horror films? I'm almost curious enough to see this one to find out what it's all about, but I have the same issue with making the effort that I have with Boogeyman.
8. The Fog
Maybe that remake of The Fog wasn't as lame as I remembered it, but then again maybe it was.
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