NC-17: FATALLY FLAWED (When a film as violent as Hostel: Part II can get an R...)

Jack Valenti has gone to that great screening room in the sky, but his legacy persists — for better and for worse — in the form of the movie ratings system. Back in 1968, Valenti's ratings replaced a capricious code of self-censorship with labels designed to help parents make choices. That's still a worthy idea — at least, it would be if it were applied with anything resembling sanity.

Last weekend, Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II opened. According to the raters, it contains ''sadistic scenes of torture and bloody violence, terror, nudity, sexual content, language, and some drug content.'' Kids should stop reading now, because they could have added: ''Bound man's penis and testicles visibly severed with shears and fed to dog'' and ''Nude woman suspended, bound and gagged, throat slashed as another nude woman below bathes orgasmically in her blood.'' (Oh, uh, spoiler alert, I guess.) Hostel: Part II is rated R, which means it's perfectly okay to take a 5-year-old to see it if you can't get a sitter.

The disconnect between movie critics who admire Roth's skill as a filmmaker and Roth himself is shown in these miles apart descriptions of the gore in Hostel Part II. From an Owen Gleiberman review of the movie in Entertainment Weekly (bold mine):

In the sado-perv fearfest that is Hostel: Part II, respectable businessmen from all over the world make bids, on their BlackBerries and office computers, to purchase a freshly abducted American college girl. The top bidder will travel to Slovakia, where, in a network of dungeons hidden behind the thick corroded walls of an abandoned factory, he'll torture and murder the victim he has bought. What's creepiest about this scenario is the way it mirrors the online auctions that have become big business in the sex-trafficking industry. Roth isn't just whipping up a blood-smeared megaplex hellhole. He's asking: In a world of global depravity, where anyone can buy anything, is homicide-for-kicks-for-the-right-price really such a huge leap?

But is that really what Roth is "asking"? Is he really "asking" anything? Not if you go by his brief interview with San Francisco Examiner's Rossiter Drake:

“A great horror scene trumps everything,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how much you spend on special effects, a great kill that makes audiences scream trumps all of that. I saw ‘Spider-Man 3,’ and people were asleep. It sucked. Now I can’t give you wall-to-wall blood — that would be boring — but when [a film] isn’t gory, it has to be creepy. If you are going to ‘Hostel: Part II,’ you’re going for that sense of dread, those scenes of intense violence, and you want more of them. And that’s what you get — the next level of depravity.”
Roth acknowledges that graphic violence is an important element in his filmmaking, but says it’s not the most important, skeptical critics to the contrary. He believes there will always be an audience for extreme horror, as long as there are storytellers committed to making smart, quality movies.
He says, “It used to be that directors made horror films as stepping stones to something else. We’ve got a wave of directors now — myself, Rob Zombie, James Wan, Darren Lynn Bousman — who love these movies, who are dedicated to making classics. There’s a perfect storm of horror right now. The studios want it. We want it. And the public is ready for it.”

FWIW: I went to last Saturday's sneak preview of Ratatouille and will post a review shortly.

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