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

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?

i really should grammar-check before accusing other people of incoherence

i dunno...i think there is something weirdly stimulating about watching things that trigger responses in your brain that you'd otherwise never have...same reason stuff like rotten.com is so popular and really the only justification for the last two gaspar noe films

I can understand people being turned off by the violence in the Hostel movies, but I'm surprised someone could miss that there's some dark humor and commentary about power, tourism, privilege, etc in these movies if they've seen them.

see thats the disagreement that fascinates me so much tho

Basically, my viewpoint is that for many of these movies there must be SOME element of enjoying what you are seeing. That is how I process most if not all movies; everything I see goes through a subconscious "am I enjoying watching this?" filter. There are certain circumstances in which I enjoy being scared, thrill rides at amusement parks being the biggest one. I do not enjoy extreme gore and I do not enjoy watching people die in the context of a horror/slasher movie; the former invokes strong revulsion that completely obliterates any enjoyment I may have while the latter is just neverending dread with little-to-no catharsis. I don't usually come out of the other end thinking "wow, I made it, what a great movie!", I think "why the fuck did I make myself watch that, now I will not be able to stop thinking about it and some of those images have been seared into my brain".

I don't like looking at the insides of the human body; that is why they are on the inside, so I don't have to see them.

Of course, to be completely contradictory, I can deal with a surprising amount of gore in an action film. I don't know why; possibly there is something about the presentation where an action film registers to my brain as Completely Unreal whereas a horror film Maybe Could Happen Therefore God No Turn It Off...? I don't know, my brain doesn't make sense in how it processes information sometimes.

(I blame most of my horror antipathy on seeing a special about horror films on television with my family at around age 5 that contained way too many scenes from "Psycho".)

Of course, to be completely contradictory, I can deal with a surprising amount of gore in an action film. I don't know why; possibly there is something about the presentation where an action film registers to my brain as Completely Unreal whereas a horror film Maybe Could Happen Therefore God No Turn It Off...? I don't know, my brain doesn't make sense in how it processes information sometimes.

see i'm the same way and i think it has less to do with un/reality of action violence (which is often more "realistic"! gangsters shooting each other happens way more than ppl getting kidnapped by psychopaths and tortured in elaborate contraptions), and more to do with the ~cruelty~ of horror-film violence.

it seems to me that the difference between irreversible and hostel is the intention people ascribe to the filmmakers, which is pretty slippery stuff when it comes to actual critique. basically GN is a repsected artful filmmaker (obv not to everyone) so his choice to have a rape scene go on for 9 violent minutes (not to mention some headsmashing and other prime torture porn exemplars) is to create an effect in the viewer - but somehow when eli roth does it he is just pandering to gorehounds with no intention behind the splatter. this seems pretty unfair to me.

xposts

what's disquieting is the animus of the violence, not the blood and guts themselves (i've seen plenty of actual blood and guts, up close, and it doesn't bother me in the least, and i still have no desire to watch "hostel" or w/e)

I prefer my horror movies to be either really atmospheric or kinetic or displaying a real strong sensibility or wit. I like fright and the fear of something but I usually don't like when there's nothing on the screen but cold agony. I was pretty afraid of seeing the first Hostel film because of this (it's also one reason I haven't seen Irreversible), and was pleasantly surprised at the wit Roth showed.

yeah i dont know where i fall on the action vs horror thing (although i mostly find action uninteresting for me i guess). i mean how many people that hate torture porn (still hate the term but im not bothering to put it in quotes anymore because eh) love Casino which has some pretty monstrous and unfliching violent shit in it?

well but its not really ~about~ the monstrous unflinching shit in it.

maybe i will see 'hostel.' i remember slocki RIP repping for it---everyone keeps saying its actually pretty witty, i just have such a hard time thinking it will be

Thats kind of a disingenuous argument though, because Casino has a whole lot more to offer as a viewing experience, while a lot of the torture porn (or w/e you want to call it) revolves pretty centrally around what people are purporting to hate.

Casino has a whole lot more to offer as a viewing experience

voiceover? sharon stone?

I only saw "Casino" once years ago but I do not remember monstrous and unflinching violent shit in it that went above and beyond what you would expect to see in a movie about mob-run casinos in Las Vegas.

yeah they cut the scene where the guy's eye pops out of his skull, come on now!

voiceover? sharon stone?

lol, I wasn't really intending a relative quality argument re: Casino

I get where jjjusten is coming from, but it feels kind of like he's arguing about why people who hate Randy Newman wouldn't differentiate between, say, Toy Story and a Newman live concert DVD. One is just a small part of the whole (that may taint it a bit), in the other its pretty much inescapable.