comment #1

JD says ...

Yet again Jeff, you stumble ridiculously when discussing genre films. If you want to compare Severance to Eli Roth, compare it to Cabin Fever (which it's completely inferior to in every way). Saying it's hipper and funnier than Hostel is borderline idiotic: a) movies that middle-aged film critics call hip are inherently un-hip and b) while occasionally quite funny, Hostel was designed as a dark, ultra-bleak horror film in the same vein of Takashi Miike and Chan-Wook Park...it's not a satirical comedy!

comment #2

north holly says ...

Just for the record, it's not so important what Hostel was "designed as" so much as what it is: a boring, hacky, scam. he's closer to ratner than miike.

comment #3

IClavdivs says ...

Jeff has been quite a bore with his festival reports. If he is not going on about something one critic or another is saying, he is finding it difficult to tell us whether a film is good, bad, ok or whatnot.

comment #4

T. S. Idiot says ...

The older one is, the less likely one is going to like horror movies, which intrinsically appeal to adolescent sensibilities, in most cases. But isn't JD being a tad rash in saying anything Wells calls hip isn't? Looking at the list of films I've seen this century, I consider Batman Begins, 2046, Infernal Affairs, Kill Bill, Memento, and Sexy Beast hip. If I am of a certain age, does that mean they aren't hip?

comment #5

Hallick says ...

Oh well, I'll still give it a looking. The Mill Valley Film Festival program just went live today and "Severance" is playing on the same day as "The Host" and "Ten Canoes" (Friday the 13th! nice...). It might be a cool hat trick. And if "Severance" really sucks, at least I can leave early and get dinner before Canoes starts.

comment #6

JD says ...

The word hip is very subjective. I guess you could call 2046 hip, but I don't see cool young people flocking to it. What I'm really saying, though, is that Severance has a very middle-aged, unhip sensibility so it strikes me as odd that Jeff would call it hip.

As for horror, people get sidetracked by content and forget that horror is all about style. It's not an accident that Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and so many of the other pre-eminent stylists of our time have made horror films. Eli Roth may not be a master of the craft quite yet, but what he's doing is far more sophisticated than what Christopher Smith is doing (and I'm talking about all four of their collective films).

comment #7

T. S. Idiot says ...

What do "cool young people" flock to, JD? Pirates of the Caribbean?

comment #8

christian says ...

I know a lot of hip young people who despisd HOSTEL. "Just a bunch of torture" was the genneral comment. Which it was, with amoral snark for flavor.

Of course, this might mean George Bush is hip then...

comment #9

Dixon Steele says ...

Am I the only one who thought CABIN FEVER was nothing to get excited about?

comment #10

Colin says ...

I don't know if excited is the right word, but I thought that "Cabin Fever" was a fun, cheeky homage to the horror movies I loved as a kid. Based upon the budget and it being Roth's first film, it was much better than I expected, even with the buzz surrounding it.

And I'll never get the people condemning "Hostel" as "just a bunch of torture." I mean, come on, it's about three solipsistic American guys who can't get their fill of kicks in Amsterdam, so they cluelessly and hedonistically get lured to Bratislava only to realize that the conditions there are so impoverished that people will almost literally do anything for money...especially when Americans are involved.

Okay, maybe it's not to the level of some of Wes Craven's earlier works, but for me that's a lot of political subtext. And sure, the violence is gratuitous, but isn't that kind of the point?

comment #11

Bilge says ...

Dixon: CABIN FEVER was more than "nothing to get excited about." It was crap. HOSTEL was marginally better from a craft point of view, but I am still convinced that Eli Roth hasn't made anything resembling an actual movie yet.

Sorry to hear about SEVERANCE. The advance word made it sound more like a witty play on genres rather than just another gore-and-torture-fest.

comment #12

JD says ...

I don't know what know what movies hip, young people go to see or if they even go to see anything, but I do know that no hip people I know would give the tumbs up to Severance.

I have yet to meet a serious, lifelong horror fan who has failed to see the merit in Cabin Fever. Nobody's saying it's La Dolce Vita, but it's a really well-made, funny low budget horror film with a good understanding of the genre's history...with a really bleak, uncompromising (and yes, humorous) ending. I've noticed that most of the Cabin Fever haters criticize it on bizarre terms and fail to grasp the metaphorical intent (good horror is all about metaphor) of the film. All they're able to grasp, it seems, is the film's major weakness: the characterizations.