Hostel an Abomination

I really do not go to the movies very often - maybe three times a year, usually for big screen productions like Lord of the Rings or any Star Wars episode or the new King Kong, and once in a while for an off-beat drama or comedy - because I enjoy watching flicks from the sanctity of my own home. It isn't to say that I don't enjoy the big screen, but every time I attend a seven p.m. showing, I am assailed by the chewing, crunching, laughing, screaming antics of junior high age children, and I'd rather not put myself through the torture.

Anyway, that said, I can count on one hand, assuming none of my digits have been hacked off, the number of so called horror movies I have seen in a theater in my life. The last one-Alien, 1979. The last one I purposely rented to see was The Blair Witch Project, 1999. Of course, I have tuned in on the usual stuff around Halloween to get my fill of Freddie, Michael and the gang. It's like anything else, when I want to laugh, I watch comedy; when I want to think, I watch a documentary. I know what I want to experience, when I want to experience it. And once in a blue moon, I want to be scared.

Such was the case this past weekend. So I went to see "Hostel". That seemed to be the movie to see for horror.

A couple of things. First, I'm not good with the gore stuff; "Reanimator" comes to mind as a great example of gore gone nuts. Second, I'm not big on the shock scene; you know-bump in the night shots. But that is exactly what I look for when I want to be frightened. They work. They scare the living crap out of me. So I have a few uneasy nights afterwards, maybe a diminished appetite for a few hours. Eventually, I'm able to dismiss the movie's reality and I'm good to go for another two or three years.

Not so with "Hostel".

I should have known something was up when the ticket guy at the box office warned me about the content and offered a money-back refund if I left before the end. But no, I figured it was all part of the hype, sort of like when theaters handed out vomit bags for "Mark of the Devil" back in 1970.

I was wrong, really wrong! I should have heeded his words.

My rating system for movies is quite simple: two eyes wide opened (great; i.e., never blinked), two eyes opened (good; i.e., stayed awake all the way through), one eye opened (fair; i.e., moments of drowsiness) and finally two eyes closed (poor; i.e., fell asleep).

"Hostel" got two-eyes-shut-so-tight-I-had-to-have-them-opened-with-a-tire-iron. My lids involuntarily closed soon after a long steel drill bit gouged its way into the bare thigh of a screaming pleading young male torture prop. It was only five seconds into what would be about a five minute long-felt like a lifetime-assault of pure, unadulterated, uncompromising, unapologetic gore. I almost didn't make it; my stomach swirled. But eventually the darkness and screaming ceased. There was a momentary break to race the plot along and propel the hero into the inevitable final twenty-five minutes of salacious slaughter and desperate depravity. My armpits were dripping like an uncapped fire hydrant.

When the disfiguring rampage began anew, I slunk my body as far down as it could go without touching the sticky theater floor, squeezed my eye lids tight, and held on as I rode the run-amok rollercoaster of bloody body tissue. I soon learned that you can't get low enough in stadium seating.

I won't go into details of the finale; well actually I can't, because quite honestly I didn't see much. But I don't need to go into it. I'll just skip to my opinion: this movie is not horror. It is wrong!

It uses a "true events" premise based loosely on an undocumented practice in Thailand in which poor souls allow themselves to be murdered by paying customers in order to collect insurance money for the families. In this case, it is a poor, remote, lawless Slovakian town whose only commerce is the business of luring young healthy humans to a dank rundown remote warehouse where they are bought as sacrificial lambs for wealthy troubled men who pay handsomely for the opportunity to torture and kill. Live Americans fetch $25,000 a piece, Europeans $15,000, and all others $5,000 for the locals who bring them in; the youth Hostel being a big player in the scheme. Everyone in town is in on it; after all, there seems to be an endless revenue stream coming from a lot of messed up CEO's-men bored with prostitutes and Vegas. It gives a whole new definition to a cottage industry.

Anyway, the reason I contend it is not horror is because it didn't scare me. It beat me over the head with lifeless limbs and Dolby dread. If I want horror, I want to watch a ten year girl munching on her dad's detached bloody arm in "living dead" delight. Or I want to see a slimy alien pop out unexpectedly from an unsuspecting space traveler's stomach. Now that is horror. I can deal with that. At the end of the day, I can say "it's all pretend".

But "Hostel" delights in the graphic detail of man's worst inhumanity to man. It cashes in on the reality of snuff films. It profits from the truths of Dr. Josef Mengele. It fills male teenage heads, the primary (and possibly only) target audience, with the most unimaginable of actual human potential. It finds and scrapes the bottom of what I thought was a bottomless pit of DNA gone bad. And it ends with a hopeless sense that nothing has been righted; that it will be torture business as usual.

And the movie is lucrative and that is wrong! The only thing more wrong is its rating. I am astounded that the movie did not receive an NC-17 rating. Astounded! The MPAA was either asleep at the switch or under the lobby thumb of Abramoff.

As far as Tarantino's endorsement is concerned, what is he thinking about? I just don't know. I mean he has a right to do whatever he wants, as long as it isn't harmful. But somehow this movie seems harmful. It's not about scaring. It's about indulging in the worst of the worst.

And by no means am I off the hook on this either. I paid to see it. I was wrong too!

Look, I'm a First Amendment lackey. Lion's Gate, the production company, has every right to create and promote what they want. But that doesn't mean that what they choose to do is exempt from being judged right or wrong, and boy are they wrong.

It will be a long time before I see a horror movie in a theater again. Maybe never. I think I'll just dust off "Plan Nine from Outer Space" the next time I have an urge for a scare.

Pathetically, that's more my style.