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May. 1st, 2006 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo I'm watching this horror movie, which is fine. I like horror movies. It's called Hostel. That's also fine even though it opens with a hostel in Amsterdam and this is more than a little relevant to me seeing as how I'm going there in June to stay in a hostel. (Of course, if anyone tries to get me to go to some BFE ex-Soviet republic for hottie chicks while I am in Amsterdam, I will resist on the grounds that I've seen this movie and know what happens if I go for that scenario.) So I'm watching the horror movie.
The basic plot is that Paxton (hero) and Josh (sidekick) go to Europe and meet Oli (from Iceland). The three of them are in Amsterdam, which they leave to go to BFE ex-Soviet republic on the suggestion of Alexi who knows a hostel there where the girls are really hot. The hostel and its girls feed the tourists into a pay-for-play organization that caters to the rich sick fuck. (Apparently there are a lot of rich sick fucks.) Oli and Josh get dead. Paxton escapes and cuts a pretty wide swath while he's doing it. That's the plot of the thing, less some homoeroticism and a few Japanese girls being tortured for our amusement.
Any suitable horror film has to provide the audience with the tenets of the genre. First off, gratuitious sex0r, mostly tits. I used to wonder about why horror movies had so many tits in them but these days I grasp the very blurrable line between sex and violence... two great tastes that taste great together. This movie has tits. A lot of them. While I am somewhat disheartened that one of the dialogue lines is "Jugs!", that falls under the tenet of bad horror movie lines and is right up there with "I have the smoothest balls in Iceland." which is another fine example from this film. (No, I am not making my examples up. I would not do that to you.) As a whole, though, yay for tits, particularly on nice-looking Euro-flavor women. These weren't even hideous half-cantaloupe tits like you get in porn films. These were a mix of tasteful fakes and nicely real. I'm okay with the amount of skin that we get in this film and it's well-displayed, to boot. They found some of the perhaps three hundred women on the planet who do not look like shit in those low-rider jeans. However, the lady of negotiable affection that Josh turned down in the Amsterdam brothel did *not* have a nice ass. She didn't. It was saggy. Not perky, not sufficiently round. I have *standards* on these things.
Suitable sense of place? Not too bad. The assorted club music was a nice touch and I really liked the street gang of children as well as how all the roofs in the town were reddish-orange.
Artistic enjoyment of the gore? (This is primarily a camera and filming thing.) Insufficient. The lighting was nice and there's a pretty good use of color throughout, but it's not a movie that is in love with the gore the way some of them are. Camera work for this shit needs to improve. If you want really good camera work for horror films, watch Audition. Now *there* is a camera that adores what you absolutely do not want to look at and makes-you-look anyway. I only had to peek through my fingers twice for this movie. (The really well-done [though I've seen it before] lopper-toe cutaway and the ankles on Josh, in case you were wondering.) For comparison, I spent about twenty straight minutes of Audition looking at the screen in little glimpses. I've since seen all the parts of the movie, but I had to turn off the damn sound to manage that. There were some things in Hostel that were effective -- the opening credit sequence was delightful. The thing when Paxton got the second room at the hostel was really well done and provided a suitable horror movie moment. The filming of implements while the guy was picking out the electric drill for Josh? That was really good. That, there, was camera love. The thing with the scissors? That was good. That was *very* good.
Horror movie dialogue? Aside from the requirements of the genre (see above), it wasn't terrible. I don't speak german or any slavic language but they had (bonus!) two Japanese girl tourists in the movie too, doing their gorgeous horror movie thing (I think this is an imprinting issue...) with authentic Japanese dialogue employing lots of words and phrases that I already knew from reading of YBP. Just in case you might ever need to know this, here are pretty much all the phrases likely to be offered to you if you are in a movie, catch a Japanese girl, and proceed to torture her: はなして (hanashite -- let go) やめて (yamete -- stop) ***ください ( *** kudasai -- it's a polite suffix for the -te form of a verb, like saying please. Hanashite kudasai would be "please let go") いたい (itai -- ouch/it hurts) おねがい (onegai -- please) いや (iya -- no).
Then we get to this chainsaw action sequence. That, that's a problem. See, the chainsaw does not behave the way real chainsaws do. If you let go of a real chainsaw in real life, the saw does not gun itself into the scary high-rpm chainsaw noise. It eases into an idle, which is not particularly loud or scary. Also, the chain does not whir around like sixty with nobody on the handle. It coasts to a stop and can't cut through much (like, say, a femur) before that happens. A dropped chainsaw also does not sit on the floor and gun itself into the high RPM sound while its chain spins around the bar so fast that it blurs. That is not how chainsaws work. Have these people never met a chainsaw?
Other technical quibbles -- I do not think that the space where an eyeball was, when the eyeball has luxated and then been cut off, oozes cream-colored goo. I think that the eyeball would dangle from the, er, optic nerve and the muscles that help you move your eyeball around to look at shit. There would not be goo unless the eyeball itself were mushed. (It wasn't very mushed.) As far as I know, eyeballs are filled with some kind of clear goo, but I don't think muscles and nerves are made of goo. The goo was a clear gross-out maneuver and it didn't strike me as very realistic. If I am sitting there looking at your gross-out tactic and going "Damn, I don't think eyeballs really do that," you have lost me. Also, I don't think it's that damn easy to cut off someone's fingers. I've read a very helpful account of someone who cut off his own fucking hand with a leatherman multitool (the hand got squished by a boulder while he was out rock climbing in the desert) and as a result, I have grave doubts about how easy it is to cut off someone's fingers, even with a scalpel. At the least, I'd expect there to have to be some fucking attention paid to the joint parts like there is when you're cutting up chicken quarters into "thigh" and "drumstick" pieces. You can cut through joints fairly handily, but if you ignore where the joints are, you had better have a big-ass cleaver to cut through the bones. This was not depicted in the film. Like with cutting up chickens, I expected there to be some twisty knife jointing bits, but there was none of that and I think that there should have been.
Presence of technology? Yes. The movie contains cellphones and uses them fairly effectively. (I divide horror movies into pre-cellphone era and post-cellphone era. Because of cellphones, it's a lot harder to realistically do the isolated and alone in the midst of mad killer persons trope.)
Ease of determining who is going to die and when? Mostly pretty straightforward. I was surprised at the body count after Paxton (our man Jay Hernandez) got out, but other than that, things fell out as I'd expected them to. I was impressed with the depth of the conspiracy. That was pretty neat and nicely done, I thought.
Other interesting thing: Takashi Miike has a speaking role in this film. (He's the guy who directed Audition and Ichi the Killer, among others. In this movie, he's the Japanese guy who is coming out of the, er, art gallery and allows as how one could spend all his money in there.) I am not a film dork. I am not a film dork. I am not... er... er... Look! A Pterodactyl!
Also, Jay Hernandez looks pretty good in a ball gag and does a good job looking terrified. Huzzah!
The basic plot is that Paxton (hero) and Josh (sidekick) go to Europe and meet Oli (from Iceland). The three of them are in Amsterdam, which they leave to go to BFE ex-Soviet republic on the suggestion of Alexi who knows a hostel there where the girls are really hot. The hostel and its girls feed the tourists into a pay-for-play organization that caters to the rich sick fuck. (Apparently there are a lot of rich sick fucks.) Oli and Josh get dead. Paxton escapes and cuts a pretty wide swath while he's doing it. That's the plot of the thing, less some homoeroticism and a few Japanese girls being tortured for our amusement.
Any suitable horror film has to provide the audience with the tenets of the genre. First off, gratuitious sex0r, mostly tits. I used to wonder about why horror movies had so many tits in them but these days I grasp the very blurrable line between sex and violence... two great tastes that taste great together. This movie has tits. A lot of them. While I am somewhat disheartened that one of the dialogue lines is "Jugs!", that falls under the tenet of bad horror movie lines and is right up there with "I have the smoothest balls in Iceland." which is another fine example from this film. (No, I am not making my examples up. I would not do that to you.) As a whole, though, yay for tits, particularly on nice-looking Euro-flavor women. These weren't even hideous half-cantaloupe tits like you get in porn films. These were a mix of tasteful fakes and nicely real. I'm okay with the amount of skin that we get in this film and it's well-displayed, to boot. They found some of the perhaps three hundred women on the planet who do not look like shit in those low-rider jeans. However, the lady of negotiable affection that Josh turned down in the Amsterdam brothel did *not* have a nice ass. She didn't. It was saggy. Not perky, not sufficiently round. I have *standards* on these things.
Suitable sense of place? Not too bad. The assorted club music was a nice touch and I really liked the street gang of children as well as how all the roofs in the town were reddish-orange.
Artistic enjoyment of the gore? (This is primarily a camera and filming thing.) Insufficient. The lighting was nice and there's a pretty good use of color throughout, but it's not a movie that is in love with the gore the way some of them are. Camera work for this shit needs to improve. If you want really good camera work for horror films, watch Audition. Now *there* is a camera that adores what you absolutely do not want to look at and makes-you-look anyway. I only had to peek through my fingers twice for this movie. (The really well-done [though I've seen it before] lopper-toe cutaway and the ankles on Josh, in case you were wondering.) For comparison, I spent about twenty straight minutes of Audition looking at the screen in little glimpses. I've since seen all the parts of the movie, but I had to turn off the damn sound to manage that. There were some things in Hostel that were effective -- the opening credit sequence was delightful. The thing when Paxton got the second room at the hostel was really well done and provided a suitable horror movie moment. The filming of implements while the guy was picking out the electric drill for Josh? That was really good. That, there, was camera love. The thing with the scissors? That was good. That was *very* good.
Horror movie dialogue? Aside from the requirements of the genre (see above), it wasn't terrible. I don't speak german or any slavic language but they had (bonus!) two Japanese girl tourists in the movie too, doing their gorgeous horror movie thing (I think this is an imprinting issue...) with authentic Japanese dialogue employing lots of words and phrases that I already knew from reading of YBP. Just in case you might ever need to know this, here are pretty much all the phrases likely to be offered to you if you are in a movie, catch a Japanese girl, and proceed to torture her: はなして (hanashite -- let go) やめて (yamete -- stop) ***ください ( *** kudasai -- it's a polite suffix for the -te form of a verb, like saying please. Hanashite kudasai would be "please let go") いたい (itai -- ouch/it hurts) おねがい (onegai -- please) いや (iya -- no).
Then we get to this chainsaw action sequence. That, that's a problem. See, the chainsaw does not behave the way real chainsaws do. If you let go of a real chainsaw in real life, the saw does not gun itself into the scary high-rpm chainsaw noise. It eases into an idle, which is not particularly loud or scary. Also, the chain does not whir around like sixty with nobody on the handle. It coasts to a stop and can't cut through much (like, say, a femur) before that happens. A dropped chainsaw also does not sit on the floor and gun itself into the high RPM sound while its chain spins around the bar so fast that it blurs. That is not how chainsaws work. Have these people never met a chainsaw?
Other technical quibbles -- I do not think that the space where an eyeball was, when the eyeball has luxated and then been cut off, oozes cream-colored goo. I think that the eyeball would dangle from the, er, optic nerve and the muscles that help you move your eyeball around to look at shit. There would not be goo unless the eyeball itself were mushed. (It wasn't very mushed.) As far as I know, eyeballs are filled with some kind of clear goo, but I don't think muscles and nerves are made of goo. The goo was a clear gross-out maneuver and it didn't strike me as very realistic. If I am sitting there looking at your gross-out tactic and going "Damn, I don't think eyeballs really do that," you have lost me. Also, I don't think it's that damn easy to cut off someone's fingers. I've read a very helpful account of someone who cut off his own fucking hand with a leatherman multitool (the hand got squished by a boulder while he was out rock climbing in the desert) and as a result, I have grave doubts about how easy it is to cut off someone's fingers, even with a scalpel. At the least, I'd expect there to have to be some fucking attention paid to the joint parts like there is when you're cutting up chicken quarters into "thigh" and "drumstick" pieces. You can cut through joints fairly handily, but if you ignore where the joints are, you had better have a big-ass cleaver to cut through the bones. This was not depicted in the film. Like with cutting up chickens, I expected there to be some twisty knife jointing bits, but there was none of that and I think that there should have been.
Presence of technology? Yes. The movie contains cellphones and uses them fairly effectively. (I divide horror movies into pre-cellphone era and post-cellphone era. Because of cellphones, it's a lot harder to realistically do the isolated and alone in the midst of mad killer persons trope.)
Ease of determining who is going to die and when? Mostly pretty straightforward. I was surprised at the body count after Paxton (our man Jay Hernandez) got out, but other than that, things fell out as I'd expected them to. I was impressed with the depth of the conspiracy. That was pretty neat and nicely done, I thought.
Other interesting thing: Takashi Miike has a speaking role in this film. (He's the guy who directed Audition and Ichi the Killer, among others. In this movie, he's the Japanese guy who is coming out of the, er, art gallery and allows as how one could spend all his money in there.) I am not a film dork. I am not a film dork. I am not... er... er... Look! A Pterodactyl!
Also, Jay Hernandez looks pretty good in a ball gag and does a good job looking terrified. Huzzah!
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-02 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-02 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-03 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-08 07:47 pm (UTC)Like, the nerdy shy guy, I was really surprised that he got whacked. I thought he would have ended up being the survivor, since he was all smart and cautious/paranoid.
Eyeballs do emit goo, usually in your eye color. But I don't think they melt, and where he cut it, probably wouldn't have emitted anything. While it was nasty looking, I think it would have been much more effective if the eye was more intact.
I think what I enjoyed the most of the movie, is how once Paxton escaped, he kicked ass and killed the bad guys without much resistance. Maybe some people like that sort of thing, but to me it's very cliche anymore, how you just know that the hero is going to have a hard time escaping, dealing revenge, looking hopeless many times, etc.. The Paxton character got to dish it out, and he covered all of the bases in surprising ways, even the chicks that lured them there, along with the guy they met in Amsterdam. And bribing the kids with the candy was great too. Seeing the other bad-rich-guy at the train station was the icing on the cake. Very nice and realistic detail when he kicked the stall open and whacked the guy's head with the door, knocking him back against the wall and toilet.
I'm glad I gave it a chance, I usually don't bother watching horror flicks at all.