First grotesque anal grafted stills for Tom Six's HUMAN CENTIPEDE (Fright Fest 2009 thread)

This seems to be a thing only horror movies do. Ha ha.

O_o at A Serbian Film synopsis. Who knew that the torture porn genre offered such rich, as-yet-uncharted territory *vomits*

xxxp - yeah was kinda wondering how they'd come up with a sequel considering that everybody in the movie dies iirc; you can't really say "well, there was another scientist, and he's mad too" unless you want to do some hangover 2 type shit

is HC2 the only sequel that uses its predecessor as an actual film? the idea of HC2 being a movie about someone who was inspired by the first movie seems like something that's never been done before and is really a cool concept.

i think scream played around with this idea although iirc the events of the first movie 'really happened' and then inspired a fictionalized movie version which was incorporated into the sequels? haha i may not rc

this is annoying me tho because im sure ive seen it done before although maybe not as directly & i cant remember where...

old testament --> new testament

not a sequel, but anyone who thinks they might enjoy meta-horror, get thee to Bigas Luna's 1987 Anguish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAW_7xghhkw&feature=related

^ oh shit yeah! great movie, bizarre and original in the best possible way. "behind you, there's another dimension"

have it on video (lol, like no shit, an old VHS tape i bought when a store liquidated its stock), but haven't watched it in ages. a plan!

plus, there's nowhere else to see Michael Lerner and Zelda Rubenstein topline a movie.

dont want to derail but people using the irritating torture porn nomenclature as a general dismissive all these movies are shit catch all are missing the point tbh. plus we had a whole thread kind of about that but i have to go find it. will link when i do.

wow Anguish looks great! and Michael Lerner speaks spanish!

Enjoying horror films - why do we (or don't we)?

oh also sorry for perpetrating starting out my last post with a torture sentence, jesus

If you can't call the purported Human Centipede sequel "torture porn", then torture porn doesn't actually exist.

I mean, you have a scene where the antagonist wraps his cock in barbed wire and rapes the woman at the end of the centipede! This ho may not be worth saving, cap'n.

eh idk, i have no confidence in human centipede 2, but i am not really down with judging stuff sight unseen (which means i watch a lot of terrible stuff tbh) - if you went by scene specific descriptors of Irreversible or Martyrs you could easily say those must be valueless torture porn exercises, but i think youd be wrong.

i am not really down with judging stuff sight unseen (which means i watch a lot of terrible stuff tbh)

lol you at least recognize how you are sabotaging your argument here, right

as ive said before, i will gladly watch 5 terrible movies to find 1 amazing thing i would have otherwise skipped.

doesn't sound like you skip much tho

xxp: (which is totally aside from you objecting to me calling a movie where someone gets sexual gratification from torturing people "torture porn")

Do you have to see "A Serbian Film", which includes scenes of pretty much every iteration of sexual snuff film that you can think of, before you can call it "torture porn"? Or are you maybe being completely oversensitive here?

torture porn is one of those names for stuff somebody else likes

wait, did that make any sense?

It made total sense, but my argument is that it doesn't make sense to object to all usages of it, particularly when describing movies that are intentionally melding together sexual acts with extreme, protracted violence.

yeah im not sure id call sushi 'torture porn'

xpost

A strong-stomached friend of mine live tweeted ASF, and it gives a good overview of the film and his reactions to it, without having to watch it, which I certainly won't.

http://lookintomyeye.blogspot.com/2011/02/serbian-film.html

haha yeah it did to me xpost

i am just 100% opposed to the term - and just because it might have a more direct and accurate application to this particular film, it still carries all of the baggage with it that came before.

particularly when describing movies that are intentionally melding together sexual acts with extreme, protracted violence.

and not to overuse irreversible, but this is a dead on description of that film as well, but that doesnt make it torture porn

Curious as to why you are opposed to the term justen, is it the lazy way the term ties it into titilation (i.e. "food porn" - a term I can't stand).

a couple things from the other thread-

i think the issue i have with the term is mostly to do with the use of "porn", which operates on a much more ahem functional level where the pleasure is more direct. in other words, using porn to describe this stuff implies that the enjoyment is contained in the visual, which is not true for me.

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 5:25 PM (1 year ago)

and i think that it carries an explicit message of shame and wrongness within it as well.

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Wednesday, March 17, 2010 5:27 PM (1 year ago)

from that ASF overview:

Poor old Milosh. He was actually quite a likeable chap until they injected him with cattle aphrodisiac.

I lol'd

It was "interesting" trying to read those tweets while at work.

The Saw movies are torture porn to me. That stupid Gerard Butler revenge movie is torture porn to me...if youre showing people in godawfully painful ridiculosly tortuous situations JUST to show how painful & ridiculously torturous it is..oh hi Wolf Creek... then I cant think of a better term for it. The throwaway & gratuitous nature of the gaze is what I find problematic. Some movies & directors use those scenes well, and some are imnature to the point where it feels like its solely to get off on it, no more no less.

immature

okay having just read the plot synopsis of "Irreversible", you are being ornery because you don't like it when people put the word "torture" in front of the word "porn"

also, please expand upon this:

i think the issue i have with the term is mostly to do with the use of "porn", which operates on a much more ahem functional level where the pleasure is more direct. in other words, using porn to describe this stuff implies that the enjoyment is contained in the visual, which is not true for me.

If you do not enjoy watching this stuff, why do you watch it? I certainly understand the value of READING a good horror story (cf the almost exclusively horror reading kick I was on between the ages of 13 and 15, or how I am voraciously devouring the plot synopses to all of these movies I don't intend to see, or how I read the Scream screenplay several years before I actually saw the movie). I do not understand how you can rationalize away the medium in which the story is presented; IMO, the medium in which a story is presented matters, almost as much as the details of the story itself (if not more in some cases; the intense creeping dread of the original stalking segments of "Halloween" is much harder to get across in prose than by showing it on the screen, for example, whereas the hobbling scene in the book Misery is WAY more graphic and horrifying than what was shown in the movie).

wrt to irreversible, the rape scene in that is probably in the top five most difficult things to watch i have ever seen, and it has a 100% juxtaposition of clinically observed and protacted violence and sex. i dont see how i am being ornery about it at all - if hostel 3 had the same scene, everybody would use it as an examplar of the torture porn genre, but since gaspar noe did it it is transgressive art instead somehow?

the second thing was building on my idea that the enjoyment obtained by the viewer is on some sort of second level emotional survival/endurance reaction/reward, not pleasure gotten from the visual itself. that doesnt change the fact that to produce this response, the visual sometimes has to be there. in no way am i saying that i dont enjoy these films (obv not all of them) - what im saying is that the visual stimulus is not the be all/end all. hence the term "porn" is misleading, because it implies that the pleasure is contained fully in the picture, and thats just not the case.

anyway, the important point here is that i am sure ill watch both this sequel and a serbian film, so if people want an eyewitness report im yer guy.

Would probably read jjjusten's livebloggin' of either film.

Gasper Noe included that scene as a shocking start to the reverse chronology, beginning with utter horror and disgust and ending with love (tainted by our knowledge of what will come next). Its intention is to make you feel horrible, yes. But on the other hand, it's something that happens to far too many people, in real life, and Noe's relentless approach to its depiction pretty much negates the "hey, dude, check this out!" factor that hampers all these shitty movies where people are tied to a chair and cut up or whatever. Like the Saws or the Hostels, where the only thing the films have going for them is the elaborate kills (much like porn, where literally everything beyond the sex is superfluous afterthought that exists to set up the sex). The rape scene in "Irreversible" may be notorious, but there are many other reasons to see the movie besides that.

wrt to irreversible, the rape scene in that is probably in the top five most difficult things to watch i have ever seen, and it has a 100% juxtaposition of clinically observed and protacted violence and sex. i dont see how i am being ornery about it at all - if hostel 3 had the same scene, everybody would use it as an examplar of the torture porn genre, but since gaspar noe did it it is transgressive art instead somehow?

This is difficult to argue because I haven't seen "Irreversible". The impression I get from the synopsis is that the movie starts with the aftermath of violence, rewinds back through the violent events, and shows the viewer the idyll the characters started from with a foreboding line about how it couldn't last; narratively, it's telling a story structurally similar to "Memento" re: exploring consequences of actions. It seems really disingenuous to argue that taking a violent scene from that story and adding it to a movie series that made its name on being about a resort where you are allowed to torture anonymous people to death does not change the context or impact of the original scene.

the second thing was building on my idea that the enjoyment obtained by the viewer is on some sort of second level emotional survival/endurance reaction/reward, not pleasure gotten from the visual itself. that doesnt change the fact that to produce this response, the visual sometimes has to be there. in no way am i saying that i dont enjoy these films (obv not all of them) - what im saying is that the visual stimulus is not the be all/end all. hence the term "porn" is misleading, because it implies that the pleasure is contained fully in the picture, and thats just not the case.

I fundamentally disagree with this. This is not at all how I am wired so the argument makes no sense to me.

see thats the disagreement that fascinates me so much tho (hence that other thread that i have oops dragged into this one i guess). i have no problem with people not being wired that way, and man, forcing someone to watch any of this stuff is the last thing i would do - i get why it doesnt work for some people, and in no way do i think that peeps are obligated to find a way around it. but the problem is stuff like:

Gasper Noe included that scene as a shocking start to the reverse chronology, beginning with utter horror and disgust and ending with love (tainted by our knowledge of what will come next). Its intention is to make you feel horrible, yes. But on the other hand, it's something that happens to far too many people, in real life, and Noe's relentless approach to its depiction pretty much negates the "hey, dude, check this out!" factor that hampers all these shitty movies where people are tied to a chair and cut up or whatever. Like the Saws or the Hostels, where the only thing the films have going for them is the elaborate kills (much like porn, where literally everything beyond the sex is superfluous afterthought that exists to set up the sex). The rape scene in "Irreversible" may be notorious, but there are many other reasons to see the movie besides that.

(emphasis mine) - why is this the assumption? and is this assumption based on actually seeing Hostel II, or just figuring that films that people lazily lump into "torture porn" cant have any redeeming qualities and the people that watch them cant have any motivation other than slobbering over gore?

My counter-question is "why do people like the Final Destination movies?"

because rube goldberg traps are awesome

This ho may not be worth saving, cap'n.

nobody lol'd here? give a man his props people that is an extra-milage lol

I do agree wrt at least the first "Saw" that there is more to the movie than just elaborate kills, but a good portion of that movie is also about a super vengeful psychopath making people do horrendous things to punish them for not being perfect human beings; the framework upon which the elaborate kills are laid isn't that pleasant, either.

xp: FINALLY TY AERO

I can't believe anyone who's actually seen one of the Hostel movies could say all the film has going for it are the "elaborate kills"

there are also boobs

lol

philistines

fwiw I have only seen the beginning of "Hostel" while they are still on the train so I am in no position to comment on what that movie is or isn't

it does seem to be really gross tho

boobs
kills
doesn't matter

I've seen both Hostels and sort of liked the OTT second one, but come on - there's no mystery, there are barely any names. Once you know what's going on, you ... know what's going on. The rest is ridiculous, guys/gals tied to chairs and tortured. If you took out the kills and gore, there would be no movie. Something like Irreversible could have existed without the shocking violence, but the shocking violence at least served a structural/narrative purpose.

your argument is really incoherent. You're using the proof that the violence of the film is intrinsic to the story as proof there's nothing going on but mindless graphic killing?