Sunday, January 08, 2006

"Narnia" And "Hostel", Side-By-Side

I'm glad that the Narnia movie continues to do well here and worldwide, but here's how Ted Baehr's Movieguide describes this weekend's top movie:

"HOSTEL is an extremely gruesome and despicable horror movie about three tourists in Slovakia in Eastern Europe, who become victims of an underground business that lures people with sex and sells them to sadistic torturers and murderers seeking perverted thrills. HOSTEL is low-budget schlock horror and pornography with a big budget sensibility. Regrettably, its slick production values and edge-of-your-seat thrills will give many children and teenagers a lust for violence, torture, sex, and nudity."

Here's their summary of the movie's contents:

"Strong pagan worldview with an element of revenge, some homosexual content and strong anti-American content where Americans are targeted for torture (which could encourage terrorists and other wicked people) but American protagonist becomes a kind of hero, plus some light moral elements and light references to Christianity, including man risks his own life to help a torture victim; at least 121 mostly strong obscenities, six strong profanities, seven light profanities, toilet scenes, and vomiting; lots of extremely strong and gory violence, including decapitations, slicing throats, graphic bashing of heads to crush skulls, bloody torture scenes, chopping up bodies and throwing parts in a furnace, point blank shootings, woman's eye dangles from its socket and man has to cut it off to ease woman's intense pain, man using drill pierces man's body, fingers and toes deliberately cut off, blood spurts and sprays, woman jumps in front of speeding train and blood sprays people waiting on platform at train station, and murderous torturer works on man's open chest cavity; very strong sexual immorality includes scenes of depicted fornication, depicted lesbianism, depicted promiscuity, depicted prostitution, briefly depicted sado-masochism, and other sexual references; many scenes of upper female nudity, some rear nudity, and shot or two of full female nudity; alcohol use and drunkenness; smoking tobacco, using marijuana and hash, and torture victims are drugged and sold to highest bidding torturer to make money; and, revenge, deceit and black market crimes."

And Bloomberg.com reports:

"'With 'Hostel' and the 'Saw' movies it's a return to really sick, unsettling images, and that seems to be what the young audience is looking for,' said Chad Hartigan, a box- office analyst at Reel Source Inc. in Los Angeles."

This is a highly divided nation in many ways, and it's simultaneously going in a lot of different directions.