No gore porn for you!
I must admit I don't particularly like the icky genre of gore porn that seems to have arisen (or revived and intensified) ever since Saw was a surprise underground hit. It's hard not to be disturbed by this image (right) from Hostel Part 2 (quite aside from the bondage equipment, even her outfit is pretty disturbing - a red vinyl miniskirt with a baby-pink corset? The sick bastards!).
A friend of mine sent me this TV3 clip about the banning of Hostel Part 2. This film fanatic friend (who, by great coincidence, happens to be interviewed in the news item) confesses he isn't a great fan of the Hostel movie franchise, but it's the principle of the thing.
Saw (rated R18 when it opened here in late 2004) was actually quite good, but that was mainly because it managed to up-end the audience's expectations with fresh twists rather than for its sicker content and themed deaths. I imagine you have to be a rather demented and/or incredibly jaded individual to relish splatter-filled images of terrified people being tortured for others' pleasure. It's the sort of movie teenagers dare each other to see without vomiting.
I remember interviewing the director of Hostel 2, back when he was starting out in horror with his black-comedy horror debut, Cabin Fever.
Eli Roth, whose old-school, splatter-horror Cabin Fever screened in the 2003 New Zealand Film Festival and was released as an R16 movie in Kiwi cinemas in early 2004, said Peter Jackson was one of his role models. At the time, Jackson arranged a private screening of Cabin Fever, showed Roth around his Miramar studios and offered him some juicy quotes to promote the low-budget flick.
Before Saw opened and stole his thunder, Roth was hoping to personally resuscitate the gory corpse of the R-rated horror. He said at the time: "I looked at directors' first features, even Bad Taste. I looked at what they did for under half a million dollars, and how clever they were with the camera, how far they pushed the gore and the violence, and how they used sound and music and humour."
Rather presciently, he also told me: "I want to make a film like Evil Dead, where it's just full-on balls-to-the-wall scares. I miss this genre of balls-to-the-wall horror, where they go for the scares, go for the gore. Also an R-rated movie with nudity ... 'cos that's a lost art form, that has all but evaporated from horror movies, and it's a crime. If I go see a movie and there's teens having sex with sheets up to their necks or bras and T-shirts on, I'm immediately taken out of the film. I feel like I'm getting ripped off."
While a certain iron-stomached cinema-goer will be feeling just as ripped off by the censor's decision to ban Roth's balls-to-the-wall horror sequel Hostel Part 2, this reviewer actually feels kinda relieved to have one less 90-min trip into recreational horror. Judging from overseas reviews, it looks like a shocker in more ways than one. One amateur reviewer on imdb.com who had previously been a fan of Roth's work panned it as predictable, with little suspense and no scares.
So, basically, the Kiwi censors may have just saved splatter fans $14.
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Either the censors were having a bad hair day, or it must be pretty damn bad.
For a movie like Salo to get through and yet this gets banned, it must be pretty grotesque.
Luckily we have torrents and usenet! Censor all you like but don't expect anyone who wants to watch it won't.
Not my kind of movie, but I don't see what good banning it will do. It seems to be a case of "I don't like it, so nobody gets to watch it" to me.
I don't know why they bother. Now people will just download it.
Come on when does a country start to get too PC? People over the age of 18 get to choose what they can so why not see this movie? It is pathetic, I suppose the only way to see it in NZ now is if you download if from the web, is it piratebay.org?
I have personally seen this movie and it is awesome! Anyone who likes hostel 1 will love the sequel. PC police are taking things too far once again.
Hello. What a load of...
It's called a torrent. You download them. For freeeeee. No $14 dollar bang bang here, bud.
Anyone who wants to see it will see it regardless of it not being released in NZ. Download it, enjoy it, up Sony, up the censors, up the backwards people that run this country.
New Zealand is a backwards country. How can it be that we're the only country in the world to ban it!
Banning and censorship is one of the best marketing tools to bring attention to productions that would fall into the margins in film festivals as "oddities" but are brought into the mainstream by making them unavailable and therefore interesting.
Censorship does not work the way it is intended to work. Humans are not programmable - we like to react, discuss and reject with our own sense of disgust. If we are protected from it, then our sense of outrage is turned on those who protect us from ourselves.
This idea that our sense of disgust is worn down by exposure to fiction is laughable when we accept the violence inflicted by Governments in that acceptable state of horror called war. Ban the 6pm news for the same reasons. It is making our young accept that military actions are acceptable. When we sanitise fiction by accept torture, we are hiding our collective unconscious in the sand.
NZ is getting worse, if we aren't PC enought now we have a patronising attitude by a group of censors who determine whether we individually are adult enough to watch this movie. Why don't they try using a bit of common sense here? Rate it as R18 and make clear to the public the content of the movie, in other words let us as adults make an educated choice as to whether we view it or not. I mean let's get real here, you turn on the TV or a computer and can view a lot worse if you wish. The fact NZ is the only country doing this is embarrassing, patronising, PC overload, and annoying.
Perhaps the censors should be transferred to communist China, sure you guys will excel there!
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I think the most important thing to note with the banning is that NZ is the ONLY COUNTRY IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD to ban this film. Australia, the US, UK all find the uncut version acceptable. What makes us so special? Do we need to be coddled and force-fed Disney as our main cinematic diet? I for one, while not a great fan of this particular franchise, am all for freedom of choice and will be seeking this film out in its uncensored form now that attention has been drawn to it (I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise).