Dr Doran
My Mail is Forwarded Here
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How'd I miss this ? Darn.
I loved Hostel 1, liked Hostel 2, and very much liked the first Saw; the second didn't do much for me.
All these comments are fair ones, especially the thought-provoking one about torture being in the news recently.
As some sort of comparison, the ancient Greeks didn't show murder on stage -- murders happened offstage BUT the corpses (or, rather, the actors playing them) were then wheeled onstage on a device called the ekkyklema. Which is pretty gory. To see Klytemnestra crowing over her husband Agamemnon's body after she has trapped him with a net must have been pretty shocking in 458 BC. To hear her discuss the drops of her husband's blood falling like springtime dew that makes the flowers grow must have been pretty shocking, then when she said that Kassandra's death added delight to her bed was pretty sick. Then in the next play to see Orestes standing over the bodies of his mother Klytemnestra and her boyfriend Aigisthos after killing THEM must have seemed horrible and horribly repetitive (but that was the point, to show that revenge killings don't stop unless the practice of revenge killing is abandoned). Ditto with seeing Medea throwing her dead children, whom she killed, at their father, Jason.
The only thing that I can add is this:
There are people to whom Hitchcock's Psycho is too gory. There are people who are fine with that but to whom Hellraiser is too gory and scary. There are people who are fine with that but who found 28 Days Later too sick. Anthony Lane at the New Yorker thought that Kill Bill 1 was too much; I thought it was amusing. There are people like me who loved Hostel 1 and liked Saw, but who could not possibly watch anything, even if it were not terribly GORY per se, in which a pregnant lady got kicked (or even a pregnant animal).
Tarantino made a good point when he said, "what some folks see as unendurable gore, others just see as exciting drama."
Or something to that effect.
To the credit of Saw and Hostel, I used to have a horrible fear of my own dismemberment, and after I saw those, I got over it completely. Weird, I know. But true.
I loved Hostel 1, liked Hostel 2, and very much liked the first Saw; the second didn't do much for me.
All these comments are fair ones, especially the thought-provoking one about torture being in the news recently.
As some sort of comparison, the ancient Greeks didn't show murder on stage -- murders happened offstage BUT the corpses (or, rather, the actors playing them) were then wheeled onstage on a device called the ekkyklema. Which is pretty gory. To see Klytemnestra crowing over her husband Agamemnon's body after she has trapped him with a net must have been pretty shocking in 458 BC. To hear her discuss the drops of her husband's blood falling like springtime dew that makes the flowers grow must have been pretty shocking, then when she said that Kassandra's death added delight to her bed was pretty sick. Then in the next play to see Orestes standing over the bodies of his mother Klytemnestra and her boyfriend Aigisthos after killing THEM must have seemed horrible and horribly repetitive (but that was the point, to show that revenge killings don't stop unless the practice of revenge killing is abandoned). Ditto with seeing Medea throwing her dead children, whom she killed, at their father, Jason.
The only thing that I can add is this:
There are people to whom Hitchcock's Psycho is too gory. There are people who are fine with that but to whom Hellraiser is too gory and scary. There are people who are fine with that but who found 28 Days Later too sick. Anthony Lane at the New Yorker thought that Kill Bill 1 was too much; I thought it was amusing. There are people like me who loved Hostel 1 and liked Saw, but who could not possibly watch anything, even if it were not terribly GORY per se, in which a pregnant lady got kicked (or even a pregnant animal).
Tarantino made a good point when he said, "what some folks see as unendurable gore, others just see as exciting drama."
Or something to that effect.
To the credit of Saw and Hostel, I used to have a horrible fear of my own dismemberment, and after I saw those, I got over it completely. Weird, I know. But true.
