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Gornography

Another check-in at Hostel
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 25th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A slice of life. What can be more uplifting than seeing a human body tortured?
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Hostel: Part II

Directed by Eli Roth
With Lauren German, Roger Bart, Heather Matarazzo, Bijou Phillips, Rich Burgi and Ruggero Deodata

“Gorno” is a handy new term for films such as Eli Roth’s Hostel series — a word that cleverly sums up the type of seductive violence one can legally enjoy in the cinema until snuff films gain proper distribution. Gornos are as bloody as any backstreet Grand Guignol murder-as-entertainment, but the pleasure lies in witnessing the tortures inflicted upon the dying — that frisson of knives and nails penetrating flesh accompanied by shocked moans. In gorno, tears and spilling viscera are the money shots.
Roth’s last bit of gornography, the first Hostel, was a straightforward chainsaw buffet. It was slaughter for slaughter’s sake, a cavalcade of methodical dismemberment as the taut bodies of a couple of American frat boys were whittled down to screaming scraps.
Very run-of-the-abattoir, really, with no intrusion of the hypocritical moralizing that one finds in the rival Saw sagas. Yet with Hostel: Part II Roth has introduced a troubling bit of commentary, mostly achieved through images, wherein our excitement for the butchery is notionally tempered by visual reminders of Abu-Ghraib.
At least, I interpreted these imagistic references as a critique of torture on Roth’s part. They may just as well signal that he finds the famed Iraqi hellhole to be the Disneyland of human suffering. Still, it’s more likely that Roth wants it both ways: torture is fun until it’s real. The old “Don’t try this at home, kids.”
The most interesting aspect of the first Hostel was its cultural assumptions. It was essentially a paean to American isolationism, where a few fresh-faced jocks innocently stumbled into the Carpathian terrors of Mitteleurope. It was filled with jingo scurrility, with all of Europe reduced to an olde worlde death camp.
It was also, obviously, a bit of nervous projection, as the picture was released just after the more famous Polaroids from the high jinks at Abu-Ghraib. In short, the film would have been better placed in the hands of sociologists specializing in national pathologies rather than film critics.
For non-American viewers, it was also difficult to identify with Hostel’s testosterone-fueled college dudes, a category of protagonist that perhaps rates just above members of a British stag party (and who in Prague wouldn’t find cathartic release in seeing a pack of bullet-heads from Dagenham being personally introduced to the Black & Decker catalog?). Toward that end, Roth now invites us back to feast upon the sliced flesh of young women.
The setup is the same: Three Americans are lured to the menacing gingerbread town of Bratislava, a mysterious place that bears a striking resemblance to Český Krumlov. There’s the simple, trusting Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), brash bitch Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and rich girl Beth (Lauren German), with no prizes for guessing who will “get it” and who walks away.
Lulled by the compulsory provincialism of the States, our American heroines are unaware that state sadism has moved into the private sector in Europe, and that the rich can dabble in murder at such Slovak killing resorts.
Lorna, by virtue of her virtues, will be the first victim, as her torso becomes a showerhead for an elegant, naked older woman, in a nod to Hungarian blood countess Erzsébet Báthory (and, perhaps, as a pre-emption on Roth’s part to the forthcoming film on Báthory by Juraj Jakubisko).
Tough-mouthed Whitney will also get a tour of the tool chest, though level-headed (and loaded) Beth just might, as in the real world, buy her way out of it all.
It must be said that this Hostel is even more predictable than the last. Still, we aren’t here for plot points, are we, unless they’re piercing an eye or tongue? We’re out for blood — spurting streams of it. Because, like porn, there’s just never enough in the world.
 

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (25/07/2007):

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