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Reviews
Hostel (2005)
A journey into what is possible....
It is certainly possible to see why some people were put off by the tits'n'arse quotient a the start of this film, subsequently writing it off as another stupid American horror cliché. However, I can honestly say that the first half or more of the movie was SUPERBLY bland, thus making it all the more realistic when confusion sets into the Backpackers hostel when people start to disappear. The sex, drugs and clubbing might be a caricature of people's travelling lives, but believe me, it is certainly accurate in describing some.
What makes this film truly great, is that it doesn't resort to ridiculous plot twists or any other particularly obvious horror stupidity to draw the audience in. It simply wends its way along, with the path of events gradually becoming clearer in a quite natural way. There were very few elements of the whole thing that I thought were just movie rubbish that could not possibly happen.
***Big Spoilers***
This counts double for the central tenet - rich sadists paying to torture and kill people any way that they please. You can say that this is not likely to happen in the world, but you probably would not say that it isn't possible. This is horror at it's base - trying to find the common denominator of fear lurking in the backs of our minds. Torture must be high on the list for most people, but this isn't the middle ages any more. Suddenly we have a realistic enough premise to bring these fears back into focus. And what is worse, the protagonists are simply normal, paying customers - not drooling, cartoonish, shadowy evils. When you see the Japanese girl having her eye blowtorched, and the matter of fact way that the American goes about it, you finally realise that the film makers have touched on TRUE HORROR - that which is inside the minds of everyday people, given vent.
Best film I have seen for a long time - one that is brilliant for it's simplicity.
Dirty (2005)
Feeble
The started out OK, if cliché-ridden and cheesy in its choice of plot line. Cuba Gooding, for all his merits, does not stand up as a convincing street personality. His gutless and blowhard portrayal must have been in part intentional due to the 'tryhard' nature of his character needlessly revealed by his colleague, but was he really supposed to show up as that pathetic? His character came across as fake in the Nth degree, and never once did I take him seriously. Clifton Collins, Jr is marginally better, often because he opens his mouth less, and the captain (praised in another review)? As soon as he said something about it being a 'war' out there, I knew the script would never allow even a passably meaningful performance to emerge.
I come from London and have spent plenty of time in the army as well, listening to glorious bouts of expletive ridden verbal diarrhoea, so listening to the uninspired tourette's-like motherf****r tirades where the aforementioned crops up every other word seems confusing and pointless, rather than real. If anybody really talks in that way in LA, I feel truly sorry for them - all that wasted effort.
The story was predictable and telegraphed, with not even an ounce of the plotting sophistication that made 'Training Day' a surprisingly good film on the first watch. In my view, Training Day didn't take itself too seriously, thus making the more cartoonish elements of the plot bearable, but this one just serves to annoy after a while with its preachy nature and attempts to be a serious and hard hitting flick.
About the time of Russian roulette, I became too embarrassed to watch any more of this garbage, and turned it off , as I found (not to my surprise) that I really didn't give a monkeys what would happen to the gangsters/policeman, or anyone else. The person I feared most for was myself, as a morning viewing meant that I could have been quietly cursing for the rest of the day about the loss of precious hours.
Just Don't.