By Wil Forbis
July 1st, 2007
There can be no doubt that Eli Roth is the best director
working in horror today. When his debut
film, "Cabin Fever," came out, I raved
about it as a visceral, terrifying return to the "alone in the
woods" genre that had been popularized by the original "Texas
Chainsaw Massacre" and "Motel Hell." "Cabin Fever" also continued a
trend begun by movies like "The Ring" and "Fear
Dot Com," navigating horror away from quasi-comedic, postmodern fright
flicks like "Scream" and "I Saw What You Did Last Summer"
back towards blood soaked splatter fests that got your heart racing and your
stomach turning. "Cabin Fever" combined (mostly) believable characters,
liquid gore and a nihilistic outlook to rattle audiences and unsettle even
seasoned horror vets such as myself.
But that was a mere prelude to Roth's next movie,
"Hostel." Playing off
America's growing sense of (deserved) isolation
in the wake of the
Iraq
war,
"Hostel" told the story of several American tourists in Europe, who,
while seeking the sexual thrills of Eastern European women wind up in a dank
fortress in
Slovakia
where wealthy patrons pay to torture young victims. The camera in the torture
scenes was unflinching and never shied away from the raw brutality and medical
textbook gore. But what made the film
especially unnerving was Roth's use of darkness and sound. For me, the most gripping points of the movie
occurred when the camera explored the barely lit halls of the dungeon while unidentifiable
noises panned across the stereo spectrum. As usual, it was the unknown that proved really terrifying.
That said, it should be no surprise
that I was eager to see "Hostel Part II" when it opened a few weeks
ago. I did and it was good. It's not a great horror flick, like its
predecessor or "Cabin Fever," but it offers a fair share of scares
intermixed with more refined storytelling. This time the movie follows two sets
of characters: a trio of female American tourists who wind up in the Slovakian
dungeon of the first film and a pair of middle-aged businessmen, also American,
who have paid to take on the role of torturers. There's a few surprises, and a certain amount
of role switching as members from both groups reveal what their motivations
really are.
The first thing that caught my eye was the inclusion of
actress Heather Matarazzo. Matarazzo starred
in the infamous and spectacular cult film "Welcome to the Dollhouse,"
a movie that took an uncompromisingly bleak view of the tribulations of being
an outcast. She has since come out as a
lesbian and generally aligned herself to left-wing and feminist causes. What was she doing
in a splatter film, I wondered. It's a
genre often accused of being as anti-women as they come. But as I watched "Hostel II" unfold
it all started to make sense. (For reasons I'll get to in just a sec.)
After I saw "Hostel II" I performed a ritual of
mine, which is to dial up the film's entry on rottentomatoes.com and peruse its
reviews. I was surprised at the
generally positive tone (no genre attracts the ire of critics like horror; it's
one more point in its favor) but one negative review stood out. Written by Linda
Cook of the Quad City Times, it denounced "Hostel II" as
"shockingly violent grotesque pornography... full of sex, nudity and
ghastly scenes of torture and stomach churning mutilation." So far, so
good, I thought, though I found these complaints a bit weird since Ms. Cook also
claimed to have enjoyed the original "Hostel." But what really struck me in the review was
this line, "Roth seems to hate women in particular."
My take on "Hostel II" was almost the exact
opposite. I saw it as a grindhouse feminist piece in the same vein of the seventies
cult classic "I Spit on Your Grave" that told the story of an enraged
rape victim who tracked down and kills her rapists. And the more I ruminated on
the topic, the more I became convinced I had several points in my favor, points
listed below.
Point 1 - I think any objective viewer will agree that the
violence in the first "Hostel," performed primarily (though not
exclusively) on men, was more vicious and graphic than anything in the
sequel. How one can say that Roth hates
women "in particular" is beyond me when he's at his worst torturing
male members of our species. (And yet,
the first movie is the one Ms. Cook liked. Hmmmmm....)
Point 2 - In "Hostel II," the two main male
characters are a gutless blowhard and a henpecked, emasculated sadist,
neither of whom has an admirable finish. Roth's argument is pretty clear: the male predilection for violence against
women is fueled by a sense of inadequacy and the acts of abuse that occur in
the Slovakian torture chamber are the work of petty tyrants desperate to
reclaim their perceived entitlement to the crown of male authority.
Point 3 - The film's protagonist and ultimate victor is a
woman. She triumphs using her superior
emotional intelligence, her ability to manipulate the inner turmoil of her male
captor, and, in a twist on the first "Hostel's" condemnation of
American excess, her access to cold hard cash.
It's ins Point 3 that I think we
can find the most rugged defense of the horror genre in general. The female protagonist is nothing new; horror
heroines have a long and cherished history going back to the suspense movies
Hitchcock made in the 40s; the men were off at war, so moviegoing audiences were mostly women. Hitch
recognized this and sensibly offered up a plethora of movies with female leads
such as Joan Fontaine in "Suspicion" or Ingrid Bergman in
"Spellbound." This trend was
alive and well 40 years later in the the golden era
of slasher flicks - the eighties - with Jamie Lee
Curtis in "Halloween" and Heather Langenkamp in"Nightmare on
Elm Street." And it continued
into the nineties and beyond with Neve Campell in the "Scream" series and Naomi Watts in
"The Ring." These movies
featured intelligent, tenacious protagonists who had to use their wits and
courage to overcome their formidable, supernatural and usually male opponents*. (The ideal of the noble heroine took a dark
turn in the recent shock/torture movie, "Hard Candy", which
unapologetically showed a sprightly teenage girl castrating a man who may be a
child murderer.) Horror and suspense are
probably the only genres where women consistently command lead roles.
* I'm not going to be willfully naïve here: part of the
preponderance of female protagonists in horror is due the juvenile desire of
male adolescents (horror's base) to see helpless women victimized by malevolent
predators. And there are plenty of horror films - especially from the no holds
barred seventies - that are truly disturbing in their women-hating. (Wes
Craven, who showed women as canny fighters in the "Nightmare on
Elm Street"
films, brutalized them a decade earlier in the grim "Last House on the
Left.") But I would argue that horror's best easily outdo the best of any
other genre in its portrayal of female empowerment.
Now of course the feminist spirit in horror in general and
"Hostel II" in particular is not your grandmother's feminism. It's an offshoot, mutant breed best
represented by Valerie Solanas' S.C.U.M. manifesto, 90s
punk band 7 Year Bitch*, and the post-O.J. heralding of Lorena Bobbitt as a
feminist icon. This is hard edged, were-not-going-to-take-it feminism perhaps
best captured by shock rocker The Great Kat, who, in an
interview I did with her several years ago, defended the scenes of bloody
castrations in her stage shows and videos by saying, "The Great Kat is
stating that WOMEN CAN BE AS POWERFUL AS MEN."
*Their anthem "Dead Men Don't Rape" foreshadowed the enraged reaction to
the 1993 rape/murder of
Seattle
musician Mia Zapata.
And perhaps this is the grim realization of the horror
genre, an insight actively avoided by both paleo-feminists
and patriarchal traditionalists. Women are undoubtedly just as capable as men
in all the noble pursuits traditionally marked as male: the sciences, sports, politics. But they may also prove to be men's equal in other areas: violence, torture, brutality.
Lynndie
England
anyone?
