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Blood, breasts and homophobia: The Ignorance of Eli Roth
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Movie poster. Lions Gate Films
There is a cinematic mediocrity in Hollywood today and his name is Eli Roth. We have irresponsibly crowned the wrong person; somewhere there is a pauper who bares a strong resemblance to our Prince of “Gornos” [gorno: pormanteau of “gore” and “porno”] with better artistic vision living on the streets making existential absurdist horror films that question societal norms and confront Hollywood standards.
Eli Roth is a filmmaker known for his supposedly extreme visions of blood and sex thrown together in one big filmic orgy of sorts. He has made only three films (Cabin Fever in 2003, Hostel in 2006 and Hostel Part II in 2007), and acquired first name billing after only one (he was also hand-picked by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to film a fake trailer for their movie Grindhouse). He has been dubbed the leader of the “Splat Pack”, a faux collective of filmmakers only indirectly related via films of the same ilk, by Total Film editor, Alan Jones. He has been selected by the media as the spokesperson for modern horror movies and is also a self-appointed Master of Horror.
It is much to my chagrin that Eli Roth is so popular. It is my belief that he has no idea what he is talking about in terms of film and its politics, and would find much compatibility with Miss South Carolina, Caitlin Upton, when talking cartography. He talks like he is an expert in the field, despite having made only three films. Because we have given him all this success, he has turned into a self-absorbed egomaniac; he’s his own number one fan. The person who professes his movies are the scariest thing you will ever see is himself. However, when anyone challenges his ways of filmmaking, he just scoffs and automatically assumes they don’t know anything about the medium. But if his movie flops at the box office, he blames it on movie pirating.
Let us first start off from where it all began for Eli. In the mid-90s, he enrolled in the NYU film program and graduated with flying colors. His thesis film, Restaurant Dogs, which was a parody of Reservoir Dogs (which is a rip-off of City of Fire and The Killing) won a Division III Student Academy Award. I guess there was a scarcity of student films that year, as I can’t imagine anyone would actually praise him for such an unoriginal film as that. We’re doing all this celebrating because he lampooned a movie that Xeroxed plots from other movies? If we are to believe that Eli Roth is the genius the media claims him to be, this just isn’t a good place to see that. It’s hard for me to think that someone with so much motivation to change the way we look at films would release all that built up creativity by using it on such a pointless flick that even Not Another Teen Movie would snicker at. I, maybe, would have been ok with it had the movie been making fun of Quentin Tarantino—such as Zucker-Abrams-Zucker’s Police Squad!, which so cleverly made fun of cop shows to a tee that you were laughing hysterically at things you never even noticed were true about those programs—but that wasn’t the case. Tarantino is Eli Roth’s idol, and the film, which I so conveniently caught pieces of on an Eli Roth documentary on TV, is more of an homage, but even more of an I-wish-I-had-made-that-movie sort of thing.
Tarantino eventually took Roth under his wing, which led Hostel to be produced by the acclaimed director. They have become such chummy-chums that Roth even showed Pulp Fiction dubbed in Slovak on a lobby television in a scene from Hostel and Hostel Part II (yes, the same gag twice) as a “shout out” to their real life friendship. Tarantino has become so smitten with Roth that whenever he does interviews for various television programs, he promotes his best friend’s new movie. They actually showed a clip of Hostel on The Tyra Banks Show when Tarantino was a guest. Yes, the movie is so shocking that it was shown on daytime television.
To get a good idea of what Roth is all about, let’s take a look at a quote of his from an interview by Erik Davis, taken from the website, Cinematical:
Well, when someone throws up while watching one of your movies, it's like a standing ovation. I want to make movies that aren't safe; that aren't for everyone. If someone gets up and walks out of the movie, it means it's really affected them. I want my films to be like a rollercoaster ride -- I want them to be the scariest rollercoaster in the park. Ya know, the best thing you can say about a horror film is don't see it.
Ok. So, we know he wants to “shock” people. That much is true. Ruggero Deodato, director of Cannibal Holocaust, has a cameo in Hostel Part II and apparently quoted saying that Eli Roth inspired him to make Cannibal Holocaust 2 because of Roth’s passion to make disgusting movies that push the envelope of horror. This is inherently ridiculous because his movies are incredibly tame when compared to others, especially Holocaust, that came out decades before his. According to the common viewer, the only memorable and “shocking” thing about Hostel was the scene in which Jay Hernandez had to cut off a girl’s dangling eye, which was hanging by its optic nerve. This is nothing to be admired in this day and age. Herschell Gordon Lewis was iconoclastically using similar gross-out techniques in the 60s, so don't get so overworked. Furthermore, at least movies like Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Un Chien Andalou had the gumption to use real eyeballs for their ocular gouging. If Roth’s primary goal is to titillate your gag reflex, then most certainly Thriller was more effective as it showed real violence as opposed to depicted violence (a real human corpse was used for close-ups of the main character’s eye). According to Roth, though, in a Deadline Hollywood Daily interview, he states, "As far as violence goes, I think at this point I've pushed the boundaries of horror as far as I can”. Obviously, you can’t show as much violence in mainstream movies, what with the MPAA rating system and all, so, with that said, there are 80 years worth of independent gore flicks to compare to his scarce filmography. You can’t tell me Hostel Part II is the end-all horror flick or that Eli Roth is the wall and there’s no more territory left behind him to be discovered.
The next quote wreaks of braggartism and is so innately reputing. In an interview with Film Freak Central, Roth begins to state his love for his own movie and how it will knock you off your feet:
The nice thing is that [it's] not for everybody, and that the people who wanna go see it, go see it--love it. I was really happy with how the movie played last night, I felt like the ending just brought the house down and that's what you want--the whole movie is about that ending. That ending has to be the denouement, that has to be the showstopper. There's a lot of competition this summer, and I think if you have a great horror kill, and a great horror ending, it trumps everything. If you can do that--Psycho shower, that opening of Jaws--I think that these other movies that are out there, no matter what major movie stars they have, or $250M budgets, I don't think any of them can f--k with the end of Hostel Part II. I think it's gonna be that movie moment of the summer, that people are gonna [say,] "Okay, all these movies are great, but--I can't f—kin' believe someone did this in a movie.”
I remember two things about the ending: a castration scene and a soccer game with a human head. Now, I’m not quite sure which part of the ending he’s talking about, but if he’s talking about the former (which I hope he isn’t), then he’s got another thing coming. Does Mr. Roth happen to remember a little movie called Sin City that came out a year before his sequel to Hostel? I’m sure he does since his mentor, Quentin Tarantino, was tagged to it. Did he happen to forget that there was a castration scene in that movie done in the exact same way as his? Now, if he’s talking about the latter (which I really hope he isn’t), that’s just stupid. In no way does that even compare to the shower scene in Psycho. It’s not even on the same level. It’s bunch of kids playing soccer. With someone’s head. I really can’t believe someone did that in a movie… because it’s so moronic.
He even went on to say that Hostel Part II is an art film (what?). “I will make a thousand arguments [it has] artistic merit. But somehow, because it's entertaining, because there are kills in it and really violent scenes, people are like, ‘No, it's exploitation’”. Right. By including children playing with severed heads, it is, somehow, on the same artistic and metaphorical plane as the cloaked figure appearing through temporal loop in Maya Derren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. When one thinks of all the great arthouse films that have challenged the ways of mainstream cinema, we obviously think of films like I Am Curious (Yellow), The Blood of a Poet, Daisies, The Holy Mountain, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and, of course, Hostel Part II.
The members of this so-called “Splat Pack” make nothing more than substance-less hack-em-ups in order to outdo the previous horror blockbuster. In other words, it’s a pissing contest. Because of this, their films become one big horror movie cliché by focusing on one tiny aspect of the genre and turning it into an exploitative spectacle to gain substantial funds. In Roth’s delusional eyes, he thinks his movies are becoming somewhat revolutionary. In reality, he’s making movies that mimic ones he admires (Cabin Fever is to The Evil Dead as Hostel is to Oldboy).
This isn’t to say that there aren’t any directors of the 2000s that shouldn’t get their dues. Lucky McKee is a young filmmaker who enticed us with his debut, May, about an awkward girl who just wants a friend, and his sophomore film, The Woods, about a school haunted by its surrounding forest. After directing May, this led him to write and direct the tenth episode of Masters of Horror, titled “Sick Girl”. If Roth is recognized for his homages to other horror films, then surely McKee should be, too. “Sick Girl” is a triumph in makeup and special effects, nodding towards John Carpenter’s The Thing, Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond and John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London. Another director, Nacho Cerdà, released The Abandoned, a ghostly doppelganger tale, which was an exercise in sheer tension, for the first annual “8 Films to Die For” horror festival in 2006. His first effort, Aftermath, is a film sans dialogue and features a classical score that runs throughout its entire course. It depicts a mortician who has an insatiable sexual appetite for his autopsied corpse. He mutilates the body then practices molesting acts upon it using a knife as a phallus. Released over twelve years before Hostel, this film appropriates the “torture porn” label better and is far more graphic and disturbing than any of Roth’s films. Not only that, it takes the horror genre to another level, to a place it’s never been before, both stylistically and thematically. That is something the film and its director should be commended for, yet they are not. If people want to see shock, blood, and gore in a new direction that redefines genres and burns clichés and conventionalism at the stake, then why aren’t these filmmakers—who seem to be doing just that, and in a far superior fashion—famous?
If you were to go to the hospital and ask the doctor a question, to which they beat around the bush and hovered around the topic without actually answering it, you wouldn’t trust them much. Such as in this case when website, Rotten Tomatoes, asked Roth to make a list of the “Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen” (which should have been re-titled as “Italian Movies That Exist”), he does just that when analyzing Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s Who Can Kill A Child? “It's a great evil kid movie, but it's one of those things where the kids are running amok and you've got to kill them, and how could you kill a bunch of kids? That idea is f—king awesome.” That’s great. Just reiterate the title of the movie and there's your review. An aficionado of horror movies should do more than just list expletives in and around the basic plot. Where’s the meat of the movie? The content? The context? The underlying meaning? Does this mean nothing to him? He also reviewed a Giallo flick called Torso, which is a movie I've been wanting to see for a while. I've read reviews and synopses of it on SlasherPool.com and HorrorHound magazine, both of which have boosted interest, but Roth's review of it does not help me one bit: "There's tonnes of nudity, hippy orgies and stuff and the girls are so hot in it. But it's completely underrated." This, unfortunately, does not fill me in on what the movie's about. If I'm watching a horror movie anywhere from 1969 to now, I can pretty much guarantee there's going to be nudity in it. In telling me that, his comment is redundant and incredibly useless. His opinions are solely based on superficiality and he has no business discussing films if he misses the point of 98% of them. It's like doing a book report on Farhenheit 451 and your thesis is "the fire was really cool". In The Book of Lists: Horror, he was sanctioned to create a top ten list of the “Nastiest Horror Movie Genital Mutilations”—a way to showcase his love for spectacle, and not allegory. In the words of a horror blogger, "He sounds like a frat guy explaining to another fratty how great the beer and crackers were at his last party".
Another part of Roth’s ignorance stems from his naïve desire to throw in elements that come across as chauvinistic and anti-gay. In one of the summer issues of Fangoria magazine, there was a plethora of hate mail that was sent in regarding Roth's homophobic undertones. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought this. When I saw Cabin Fever in the theatres, one of the characters refers to a squirrel as being "gay". I scratched my head confusedly, then shrugged it off. Next, when I saw Hostel, the characters did nothing but call each other “faggot” throughout the entire length of the movie.
Eli Roth defends these claims by saying, "[K]ids use the words 'gay' to describe something they think is stupid or idiotic. I am trying to write characters who are real, and speak the way young American people actually talk to one another. When someone is acting like a pussy, they call that person a 'fag'."
Pardon? I guess he didn’t realize what he said. So, apparently homosexuals are “pussies”? Is this what he’s saying? You are not supposed to cater to an audience what people do in "real life". A movie is fake; it's a representation. The dialogue in the movie does not at all represent the way we talk. All this combined is supposed to help whatever point you're trying to promote. Whatever your heroes do in the movie, endorses a set of views. You are in charge of everything in your movie, from the things the characters say to what they wear. If you are not careful, you may be saying something you never meant to say. Without a doubt, I found the undercurrent of bigotry to be more obscene than his "gory visuals".
A Fangoria reader responds to Roth's letter and says, “I find Roth's defense invalid and uncool. The characters, clearly meant to be the heroes, use anti-gay words such as 'fag' against a friend. He believes that using these words is OK since, according to him, they mean 'idiot' or 'stupid' instead of homosexual. The point is that all the negative words and actions are equated with homosexuals as something bad.”
Roth, who should have just stopped talking by now, responds yet again. "This is the last I will say on this subject, because [Fangoria] should be used for discussing horror movies, not politics." But wait. In a Fox New interview, he said that “[I]n times of terror, people want to be terrified, but in a safe environment because with all the things that are going on in the world, certainly with the war in Iraq and the horrible, horrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where our government did nothing to help anybody, you want to scream”. So, horror movies are about politics? With that said, Fangoria should be the perfect place for discussing it. You see, film is political. Film is art. It's a dance. It's an experience. Discussing politics is one attribute about discussing horror movies. Don't tell me that we can't discuss our fears of Government values when we watch The Crazies or the psychosexuality of the demons within us in Shivers because Fangoria doesn't condone these topics unless we're saying, "Oh my God! That movie was sooooo gory!" We have the right to challenge a filmmaker for his unsightly views on sexual preference. In an effort to defend himself further (which at this point is futile), he begins to compare himself to that of Stanley Kubrick. "In The Shining, when Grady refers to Halloran as a 'nigger cook', does that mean he's a racist, or that he's simply reflecting the attitudes and language of his time? Does that then mean that Stanley Kubrick supports racism because he accurately reflects his era?" First of all, Grady is a ghost - one of the antagonists of Jack Torrance. His derogatory racial views on Halloran are solely to emote anger from Torrance - not because "that's the way they talk". Roth’s characters, on the other hand, are gratuitously spouting out prejudice, like there's nothing wrong with it. Secondly, that was a horrible comparison because Grady is, get this, the villain. The bad guy—not the good guy. The difference between pejoratives is that the people in Hostel using them are the heroes. The actual homosexual in the movie was the villain. What’s that say? Homosexuality is bad. How could he overlook that? But according to Roth in a Film Freak interview, “It's actually very carefully thought out”.
Not only are his movies anti-gay, they're so blatantly pro-heterosexual, as if to cloak his insecurities of masculinity. You can't watch one of his movies without seeing a group of frat boys having lots and lots of sex, and high-fiving each other at how macho they are. In the words of Darren Small, proprietor of a letter sent to Fangoria, "I'd propose to Roth that it's more radical to challenge stereotypes than to regurgitate them and then accuse others of being too PC when they question his motives".
Because of the heat he got from making the first Hostel, he decided to make Hostel Part II—a more mature Eli Roth horror film—by telling the exact same story, but with the genders reversed. Brilliant. In an interview with Film Freak, he said, “If people say that they think the films are misogynistic, well, you see Hostel Part II and that will clear all of that up. No one will feel that way after they've seen this film." Roth realizes he did something wrong in the first movie, and audience members told him that. Like they were his professor, they told him his first paper was below average and asked him to rewrite it to get a better grade. Roth acquiesced and made Hostel Part II. It is not a sequel. It is a second draft.
Ultimately, in the end, Hostel Part II didn’t do well at the box office, despite the amazing dénouement he predicted would be on par with Psycho. Though, it is not himself he blames for the poor reception. No. He blames you—the viewer. According to his MySpace blog, he states, "Piracy has become worse than ever now, and a stolen workprint (with unfinished music, no sound effects, and no VFX) leaked out on online before the release, and is really hurting us, especially internationally.” Rather than take the blame for a failed movie, he cowardly accuses his fans for poor sales. He also states, “[A]nd while it makes a smaller dent in huge movies like Spider Man 3, it really hurts films like mine, which have far less of an advertising and production budget.” In other words, his movie wasn’t made badly. If we didn’t bootleg his movie, it would have made the money it deserved.
What this all boils down to is that our culture is being stripped down to its bare minimum. It is lowering the bar of how good cinema can be. What Eli Roth is doing is creating movies that, somehow, set the standards of modern day film when they should be as forgettable as Wrong Turn or Darkness Falls. If this keeps going on, who knows what the future will bring our youth. Perhaps being average is the new Scorcese or Billy Wilder, and cinema will never hold sway. If that’s the case, then, Eli Roth is your man.
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