I’m going to regret stepping into this, but his point was that you were the one who dubbed it “torture-porn” in this thread, which gives the impression that you’re solidly biased against the genre even though you haven’t seen the movies in question. Nobody thinks you invented the term.
So one can’t read something interesting and put it out there for discussion without being associated with that viewpoint? I don’t believe that; that’s what quotation marks are for!
Is this level of rhetorical angst really necessary? If you look at the title and your first post, you seem to have formed a pretty strong opinion about these movies. It’s an opinion I don’t totally disagree with, but there you go.
You’re really arguing from ignorance here. Neither of the first two Saws could aptly be described as misogynistic. Heck in the first one the worst it got for a female was someone trying to kill Monica Potter’s character. She wasn’t tortured, just fighting for her life for a bit.
I haven’t seen Hostel so I won’t comment on them, but judging people for watching a movie that you haven’t watched is rediculous.
The entire damp, voyeuristic subgenre holds no appeal for me, so I haven’t seen any of them. At the same time, I am violently opposed to any form of censorship at all. Therefore, I don’t agree with all of the points in this review of Captivity - especially the ones dealing with “criminal immorality,” etc.
However, make no mistake. It is a fine, Pitworthy, immensely entertaining screed. There are, however, open spoilers. Fair warning for anyone who’s too goddamn stupid to figure out the entire plot of the movie from watching the trailer.
A message which is utterly destroyed in Hostel II, which I think may be most obscene movie I’ve ever seen. Not because of the gore, but because of its theme.
In the first scene, we see the hero from the first movie tracked down by the snuff gang and killed in his home. Then the heroine in the second movie, after having all of her friends brutally killed by sicko fucks, tells the Snuff Boss that she’s an heiress to a sizable fortune. Thus, the woman simply buys her freedom with the caveat that she must kill her captor and “join the club.” She does this, walks away and alerts no one to the terrible things she’s witnessed. The guilty go unpunished and free to carry on their course of kidnapping more college girls so lecherous businessmen can carve into them while they scream for their mothers.
Fuck you, Eli Roth.
The first of which happens to be an excellent version of the “sex bad, violence ok” mindset. The entire film is a 60-minute dismemberment and disemboweling of one victim. When the victim is naked on a table, the genitalia is blurred out because that’s bad. When the executioner pulls the victim’s intestines out and drapes them over the genitalia, the blurring disappears because that’s ok.
Ah, so you’ve just destroyed the entire theory of advertising. Well done.
I’d say exactly the opposite is true. The majority of horror movies have prolonged death and torture sequences for the female characters, while men get to die quickly and/or off-screen (the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a prime example of this, especially compared to the remake). But you’re right – Hostel was quite novel in that the main torturees were male, and that there was no implication of a sexual motive/rape in ‘buying’ and killing women.
I think a problem with this discussion is that no boundaries have been set in the definition of ‘torture porn.’ I define it as worse than Hostel but just short of an actual snuff film. Some poeple seem to think Friday the 13th fits the bill.
But it wasn’t porn! It was “art films”! 
Strangely, I find the more modern “torture porn” movies to be much tamer and getting away with far less than their predecessors were allowed in the 70s and 80s. In today’s movies also, there is an abscence of graphic rape (thankfully IMO) which was relatively common a couple of decades ago (e.g. I Spit on Your Grave, Evil Dead, Xtro). Movies such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Driller Killer were far more sadistic in attitude. The “kill people in weird creative ways with ever more bizarre instruments” oneupmanship of horror directors has all been done before.
Today’s resurgence of the horror/slasher genre is evoking the same discussions we all had 20-30 years ago, and the same fears from the public as their popularity spills over from the niche genre fan into the mainstream. Today’s difference is the prevalance of DVDs, megaplexes, and on-demand cable which has made the accessability for the young’uns much easier.
Rest assured, the restriction and censor pendulum is about to swing the other way, the films will become tame and cartoony leaving actual horror behind (as happened with Jason & Freddy) and the genre will slip back into indie obscurity until the “next big thing” like Ringu makes horror fashionable again.
Nitpick: that wasn’t the first one. You’re referring to Flower of Flesh and Blood, which was the second in the series and the one for which the series is most famous. The first was The Devil’s Experiment, which was a really quite boring movie about some dudes torturing a woman; there was no context, though, so the whole thing seemed really distant and just dragged on and on.
But yeah, it sort of goes to show that we’re not the only society with odd sex-in-art taboos. In the US, we’re really skittish about nudity of any sort, and one boob gets a film an ‘R’ rating. In Japan, so I hear, you can buy comics about tentacled demons raping barely-past-puberty schoolgirls out on the street, but any depiction of pubic hair is a no-no. I truly do not get it. I mean, they invented bukkake, for cryin’ out loud!
You haven’t been looking in the right places. A lot of the current stuff is just as gleefully sadistic.
Jeez. You know, I can’t say I’m happy to know that something like this exists.
You know, I can’t tell you how many ads I’ve seen for tampons, but I’ve never bought them.
An ad, may alter someone purchasing habits, briefly, then the actual quailty of the product should be a big factor.
But the OP isn’t talking about that and you know it.
No the OP believes that seeing a movie will make someone a killer. He may couch it in terms like ‘de-sensitized to violence’ or some such non-sense but that is the bottom line.
Sebhal, wow, I had no idea the Brits had such a different opinion of porn.
How about this? Do you read the PIT?
How many people want to kill someone for some small crime. Like wearing dress shoes with jeans get a your face smashed in with a champagne bottle.
I’ve seen Saw, terrible dissapointed me. But even in that the killer ‘clown doll?’ felt that the people he tortured had violated some ‘rule’ and needed punishment. So yes, people can relate to the villian in these films, just as people love Tony Soprano, and yet, they don’t form crime syndicates.
It’s no different than those who believe in capitol punishment, or people who think an artist has gone ‘too far’ and then want’s to destroy their creation. So, give one of these movies a chance, you may like it.
OH and the upswing in violent crime? It’s pretty well documented that a country involved in a war, sees a upswing in violent crime. So, there’s that. Actually, the war on terror is probably responsible for the upswing in violent/torture films.
neek neek neek…neek neek neek ::shudder
OK, that makes more sense than my interpretation. He was terminally ill and got pissed off that people were sleepwalking through their lives, so he woke them up and made them realize how dear their own lives were to them. My point earlier in the spoiler box was that they don’t learn a lesson if chances are they die trying to escape; they can’t take their newfound appreciation for life and change things with it… But the idea that he is simply punishing them for taking their lives for granted makes more sense.
This may be true, on the face of it. However, the difference between most of the titles you mention and torture porn is not, as you point out, the torture: the difference is the porn. The reason it’s called torture *porn *is that a voyeuristic indulgence of torture fantasies is the only purpose for many of these movies. The great horror films of the 70s–*I Spit on Your Grave *is probably the best among your examples–used scenes of violence to address larger, deeper issues.
No one–no one that I know–decries these movies, prudishly, simply because they’re violent. But because they’re nothing *but *violent: porn.
I don’t dispute your central point, but I Spit on Your Grave never struck me as having deeper buried issues; it struck me as nothing but a long, glorified gang-rape. The woman’s revenge scenes seemed like a diversion, a little moral sleight-of-hand to let the audience wallow in the grotesque rape scenes but not have to feel bad about it. I know the director said that wasn’t so, but what else would he say?
Speaking from a purely artistic point of view, there may be another reason for this—in our culture, the female form itself is “beautiful,” the epitome of the human form. Aesthetically, the male is often merely “functional,” at best.
Look at it this way—which makes you cringe more: vandals taking a sledge hammer to a cinderblock retaining wall, or the Poseidon of Artemisium?
:shrug: The Guinea Pig series is basically an F/X experiment. There’s no story, no plotline and barely any dialogue, just seeing how realistically the blood 'n guts can be depicted without actually harming anyone.
The later films in the series take a lighter tone, upping the ‘ick’ factor while playing it for laughs.