Pointlessly nasty

Rating: 1/10 (16 August 2006)

I love horror films, and though obviously I'm going to put films like the Devil's Backbone and the (original) Haunting at the top of my list, films with some character and meaningful plotting and subtlety, I'm not above enjoying a bit of mindless gore either, what Stephen King called "the gross-out".
But this film left me feeling dirty. It's just plain nasty. Two thirds the way through, there's a scene  SPOILER COMING UP  where the hero rescues a woman who's being tortured with a blowtorch. Her eye is hanging down her cheek, and our hero has to snip it off with a pair of scissors. I put the DVD on pause and went to make a cup of coffee to recover. "No", I thought, "that's not clever. That's just taking the p***."
The strangest thing about all this is the involvement of (as producer) Quentin Tarantino and (as actor and mentor) Takashi Miike. Those two between them have directed two of the most memorably nasty scenes in cinema history  the torture scenes in Reservoir Dogs and Audition respectively. It's worth pausing a moment to consider why those scenes are great, because they are everything this film is not. In Reservoir Dogs, the worst thing never actually happens. Slicing off an ear is bad enough, but it's not the most terrible thing, and all it does is establish that the psychopathic torturer is capable of anything. Everything after that is all in the audience's imagination; it's all in the thinking of what might happen. The torture in Audition is even more explicit, of course, shockingly so, and first bad things happen, then even worse ones. But it's timed perfectly, and it has a real moral purpose. The hero has done wrong, there's no doubt about it, but surely, we ask ourselves, not so as to deserve this.
No such intelligence or artistry or simple technical skill informs anything in this film. Not at all. There's nothing in the script or characterisation to make us care about these people in any way, and though the Director makes a sort of half-hearted attempt to build up some tension and creepiness, he just abandons the effort after about half an hour as though saying "Right, that's enough nonsense for an intro, now let's get on with the torture".
So incompetently is this done that we're presented with our first glimpses of the torture chamber from the point of view of the victim looking through a hole in the hood over their face. Any possibility that we might feel some empathetic fear here is rather spoiled by the fact that we don't actually know whose eyes we're looking through. We can make a good guess, and it turns out that probably our first guess is the right one, though it could have been one of several people. But this isn't clever or skillful: it's just lazy and incompetent.
The worst of it all though is that these aren't bumbling but enthusiastic amateurs. They're smart, experienced filmmakers. If they were amateurs, you might award them some credit for breaking out of the usual dismal "re-making my favourite scenes from the Evil Dead/Blair Witch" mode. But these people are clever, and don't they just know it.
This is what is finally hard to take, the sense of being patronised by these fools, who hold our intelligence in such disrespect that they think all they have to do is gross us out and we'll be amazed.
Here's an odd little trivial detail which I don't think anyone's noticed. Having arrived at the hostel and having fallen prey to the siren seductresses who lurk there, our two heroes enjoy a sexual encounter with them (not so much soft-core as parental guidance). This is accompanied by some exotic music, the first few bars (I was going to say snatch, but that somehow didn't seem appropriate) of which are a quote, too accurate not to be deliberate, from Britt Eklund's dance in the Wicker Man.
Yeah, clever. But not clever enough. Don't patronise me. First, make a decent film. Then you can set about dazzling me with your witty allusive references and homages.
Oh, and I'm not surprised there are protests here from Slovakians. I've never been there, though it's one of many places in Eastern Europe and the Balkans I'd love to see (one of the better musical choices in the soundtrack was a little hint of Smetana as we look over the river running through the city), but even without knowing the country, I can tell this is just a crass insult, almost racist in its generalised offensiveness and sublimely adolescent dismissal of the morals, intelligence, and integrity of an entire nation.
I'm being harsh. I think Eli Roth could make a good film. But first, he has to face up to what a bad one he's made here.