By Robert Crane
If you have any thoughts of seeing the movie "Hostel", you just might want to read this first. Or if you saw the movie and find yourself asking "what the hell was that", you might want to read this too.
I really do not go to the movies 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, once in a while for an off-beat drama or comedy. That’s not to say I don’t watch flicks—I do, just in the privacy of my own place. The problem is that audiences annoy me with the talking and the chewing and the crunching and the snorting already. I have a control issue about my viewing environment, okay?
Anyway, 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.
This article was written by humorist Robert Crane. If you like what you read and want a bit more, please visit his popular website at: http://www.cranelegs.com
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By Ralph Crenshaw
There are many who say that the movie is never as good as the book, sadly, as this The Da Vinci Code movie review will show, they are probably right. The movie had all the makings to become an enormous success. Tom Hanks as the leading man, an Oscar winning director, and based on an incredibly popular best selling book. The creators of this film must have taken that for granted as they forgot to make this a good movie.
The story is disjointed and none of the mystery and puzzle solving the book was famous for transferred onto the big screen. The screenplay is weighed down by pointless exposition, never giving the audience any character development. Details that where small in the book were made huge in the movie, and very important sections of the book were either fast forwarded through or left out all together.
Critical plot points are “included” via flashback scenes that I have no idea how someone who has never read the books is possibly supposed to understand. The character development of the albino monk was on of the most fascinating storylines in the book. Besides one or two unexplained flashbacks this was completely ignored in the film.
When a new clue or riddle presents itself there is no explanation to how the character solves it, it is almost like they are struck by divine intervention when figuring it out. The book was a RIDDLE MYSTERY. The movie doesn’t even come close to having that feel. I want to feel the suspense and anxiety the characters go through when facing a seemingly unsolvable mystery. Instead we had people standing around until the cartoon light bulb appeared over their head, so the story could continue.
The biggest testament to how poorly the script was written was the awkwardness of Tom Hank’s character. I have never seen Hanks give a poor performance, but even he seem baffled at the directions this movie took. It takes a great deal of work to make Tom Hanks look bad, but “The Da Vinci Code” tried very hard. Instead of being able to focus on the story, I was left feeling sorry for Hanks for having to put up with such a piece of garbage.
While the movie was pretty to watch, it lacked any substance or intrigue. The people behind the scenes must have become incredibly lazy to make such a bad translation. With the book being such a huge success there was obviously room for a huge letdown, but this film crashed straight through even that floor. If you have never read the book there is a chance you will be entertained, but if you have, expect a huge disappointment.
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