The last film I saw at Cinevegas last night was Eli Roth‘s Hostel, Part II. God, what a heartless and vile thing to sit through. It’s a real shame because Roth is an above-average filmmaker. He’s got real talent and good instincts, but his head and his soul are in the sewer.
The house was almost completely full. The crowd was 95% twentysomethings. Couples, mainly. I was standing off to the left side, and something realy weird happened about 20 minutes before the end. A short Hispanic woman in her late ’20s carrying a daughter — a little over a year old, maybe 14 or 15 months — came in and stood next to me. A woman who may have been her mother was with her.
Actresses were screaming for their lives, black-red blood was flowing and a bad guy was getting his dick cut off (this produced the only loud “ewwwww!” reaction from the crowd), and the Hispanic mom was letting her 15-month-old daughter watch it. And the kid was reacting from time to time, making little sounds.
I was always pretty liberal about what I let my kids see when they were young, but you never take kids to a movie like Hostel, Part II, for Chrissake. That Hispanic mom is a degenerate — that’s all there is to it. She’s trash.
I was convulsing with disgust as I stood next to her and listened to her kid make those little goo-goo noises. I was asking myself how representative she might be of working-class moms these days. I turned around and stared at her three or four times. I couldn’t believe it, but there she was and there they were — three generations of female moviegoers watching torture porn.