These kinds of things are subjective, but I disagree vehemently. I Spit on Your Grave is decidedly not torture porn. I don’t have a problem with the fact that you didn’t see any more to it than that; many people would agree with you. It’s obviously possible to watch it–and enjoy it–as if it were, but for me (and many others) there’s a great deal more to it than that.
Looks like the marketplace has spoken:
I haven’t seen 28 weeks later, but is it really the same kind of movie as Hostel? I loved 28 days later.
28 Weeks Later is a different kettle of gore. It had nothing to do with torture porn. Not sure why the author of the article was trying to lump it in with the torture dreck.
And what the fuck is someone like Roland Joffe doing directing a torture porn film? He made what is arguably one of the best ten movies of the 1980s and he’s reduced to doing this shit? WTF! The reviews of Captivity have been horrible.
I don’t see how his death in the second movie negates his heroism in the first. In fact, one of the major themes of the first was his path of redemption. At first he was an obnoxious asshole to whom “chicks” were only objects to fuck, and in the end he risked his life for one.
I agree with you that the resolution of the second was a pretty big :dubious: . Hell, having to accept that such a huge enterprise could even exist is a major :dubious: . Dozens of employees and outside accomplices, and who knows how many clients…someone would spill the beans at some point.
Even this is negated by Eli’s nihilism minutes later when the woman the douchebag saved throws herself in front a train because her face has been so hideously mutilated. Her act of suicide is unwittingly enough of a distraction for the douchebag to escape the railroad yard unnoticed. Sorry, but I find that extremely unsatisfying.
At least one, well, on this side of the pond anyway…
Millers Crossing.
Rated 18 (NC-17 equivelent), contains NO nudity, NO bad language (not even shit, or piss… NO BAD LANGUAGE AT ALL), and still gets rated 18 due solely to the amount of violence it contains.
I think, although I’m not as sure, that the recent Punisher movie has a similar fate; correct me if I’m wrong.
Paul Verhoeven seems to have a lock on this, many of his films get NC-17 ratings but then, thanks to pressure, he edits them to get the R.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974767-1,00.html
Of course *Basic Instinct * does include sex scenes. A better fit for what you are mentioning was Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall:
And yet the bloodiest, most violent, hightest bodycount movie I’ve ever seen would have never been given an NC-17. Saving Private Ryan. Heck you have to be 18 to join the Army!
There are a lot of Microsofties in the neighborhood my videostore is in. Consequently, we have a lot of customers with French, English, German, and Australian accents. I’ve become conditioned to the probability that, if a parent asks me *why *a particular movie is rated R, the accented customers will let their kids watch it if it’s due to sex; the unaccented locals, if it’s due to violence. But rarely, if ever, vice versa. FWIW.
I say not only should these films be allowed, but they should be mandatory viewing for high-school students, and if the students try to look away, then should be held in their chairs with nails through their hands, thighs and ankles, with their heads immobilized with barbed wire wrapped around their foreheads and their eyelids cut off.
It’s for their own good.
I was already starting to hate Eli Roth, but this did it for me:
(From this Wikipedia article.)
How about his “I repeatedly watched the Daniel Pearl video for inspiration.” Nothing like exploiting real life human suffering for your own personal gain, Eli. Biggest douche in the universe.
Oh yeah, there’s that, too. Y’know, I always thought a true sociopath could be a success in Hollywood; maybe that’s what we’ve got here.
I agree with the topic starter. It is a very twisted trend.
There is an underculture in existence witch is based on Sadistic abuse of adults and children, films it, and finds ‘peers’ either for money or some perverse trade, with which to do business.
There is also most likely an industry involving trade of abuse of children and snuff movies, that well-to-do and rather gormless people believe does not exist.
The trend amongst the rest of society to simulate the same thing as a snuff movie, which ironically was the highbrow pretext used by the director to justify Hostel, is even more worrying than the existence of an extreme subculture that actually does it.
Torture porn is sick, and people who think that what they do is actually GOOD ‘because if we can make it so good you can’t tell the difference, why would anybody make a real snuff movie’ are relentlessly stupid, and dangerous.
The one criminal request that was intercepted in the ordering of real snuff movies in Italy, specifically stated that the buyer wanted REAL deaths and nothing simulated. The kind of people who actually would distribute and buy a snuff people are so nasty that you would never as a movie director try to make a fake and not expect a pissed off client to have you sorted out. These are the same people who are involved in people trafficking - which yes, includes the forced prostitution of children. They can easily find foreign nationals and others to use in their abuse videos.
And after a few such ‘sessions’, it seems to me incredible that such victims would be released to wander straight into the local police station. And it is CERTAINLY more expensive to make a sophisticated fake - which when using prosthetics, cannot easily show live action and realistic movement, than using a homeless person and then dumping the body afterwards in a cesspit. The extraordinary cases in Belguim is a case in point.
Polite society is ignorant of the depths and capability of organised crime. Even the police have little handle on how bad things like people trafficking for sex is getting in Western Europe.
Now zombie porn? … yeah, baby!
Let me tell you, I came across a snuff movie on the web. I saw it only for 3-4 seconds and closed it down, but before I did the deed was already done. Was it real or a very, very sophisticated piece of computer animation? I could not possibly tell, but the mannor and bleakness of it and the womans expressions told me it was real.
She was shot in the head. I emailed the FBI saying I had come across it and would search back to find the link and email it to them. Officially their website says these movies do not exist.
They never replied to me. Clearly they could not care to look - this would explain why they haven’t found any.
Hello, scooter, welcome to the board.
You’ll notice that the thread you posted in hasn’t had any activity since 2007. There’s a board policy against posting to “zombie” threads. They’d prefer you to strat a new thread if you want to reopen a discussion on some subject from an old thread like this.
In my Intro to Game Design class the best definition, the class, the teacher, or multiple books could come up with for modern society is “something that illicits and emotional response.”
I keep seeing these parroted, no one has really asked for a cite, but here’s one graph from the US BJS anyway.
Here’s a more recent one comparing age demographics:
My other cite broke, but a few places assessed the higher juvenile rates may be accounted for by the fact that they’re much more likely to be caught than adults, but even accounting for unreported crimes and uncaught crimes I don’t think it would suddenly spike the results that much.
I know you weren’t asking me, but I don’t think we’re hardwired to be violent so much as respond to violence. With more globalization we now have more problems to worry about than ever, specifically the pain of people you don’t even know. We’re bombarded day by day by some third world country being brutalized by rogue police, the army killing civilians, whatever. Now in the past this could be healthy, sure, you heard the odd thing about the French Revolution, but not every day. Chances are, if you were exposed to these things it was happening close to you and you response would be prudent. Either you evacuated the area/prepared, or you joined the army (flight vs fight).
This held up to about World War 2 where the Nazis could be easily characterized as cardboard cutout villains, and you could even tell a hint of it from the initial response to 9/11. But once the media starts bringing in the attacked country’s feelings into it you don’t know who to be scared of, who to root for, etc and you can’t just join the army to “vent” these feeling because they might be the bad guys. The natural responses are either local violence, gang wars, drugs, whatever, but most well adjusted people don’t like hurting people that have a definite face and personality (as opposed to not caring as much about hurting people they don’t know). This leaves us to outlets like movie violence. Or to feed the “flight” response, movies about soldiers feeling regret and coming home, or undermining the regime, or some deus ex machina happening and saving everyone (or some faceless extraterrestrial villain with no emotion eating everyone which becomes OKAY to kill).
Now obviously this is a big guess, I’m not a social psychologist or anything, and even if I’m right the effects are greatly different from person to person, but I do think the recent spike combined with the sharp decline in violence is tied to SOME hardwired mechanism, even if only tangentially.
How many people do you REALLY think mean that? Sure, I talk about senseless slaughter and beating people’s faces in all the time, but if it ACTUALLY came down to hurting someone in real life it’d only be after I’d exhausted all other available options. And I think that’s true for most posters, we talk because real, actual, senseless violence has almost become foreign to us, most people alive in developed nations haven’t seen piles of bodies burning in the streets. It’s a characature (sp?) now, we talk about it because as far as our internal processing is concerned it’s not a real threat anymore. We joke about it but we’d rarely do it. In fact, I could see all movies having a happy ending where no one actually gets hurt could exacerbate a problem, the more people that die and get hurt with REAL consequences the more it would condition us to avoid it. I’m not actually arguing that, I think that analysis leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s an interesting angle to explore at least.
No upswing to my knowledge, unless you have a more recent statistic you’d like to share (I’m legitimately open to things that contradict my graphs).