Alfred Hitchcock - who started it all with Psycho - once said, "Ingrid, it's only a movie." But he hadn't seen Saw - which American critic Roger Ebert found "cheerfully gruesome". "What horror films have been waiting for," is what Quentin Tarantino said about Hostel. The Catholic News Service saw things differently: "A nauseatingly vile horror flick - a steady stream of soft-core sex and hard-core gore, as gratuitously pornographic as it is mindless. The stomach-churning is extreme by even the barrel-bottom standards of Quentin Tarantino, its producer." The New York Times described it as "one of the most misogynistic films ever made".
Where will it all end?
An embrace by the art and mainstream crowds means only one thing - the genre is running out of steam. It's also hard to top a scene in which someone's face is blowtorched, the scorched eyeball is yanked from its socket and the dangly bits cut (the first Hostel film). But diehards will doubtless turn out for Wan and Whannell's Dead Silence, about a possessed ventriloquist's dummy; Cell, Eli Roth's stab at a Stephen King story; and new boy Todd Lincoln's Hack/Slash, which doesn't really need a plot summary, does it? All come Certficate 18 guaranteed.
