This Is a Post About Movies

After last year, Dennis was unsure if he would attend B-Fest 2006 so a few days ago, I exchanged some email with him to double-check that his intentions hadn't changed. Basically, if I can't go with a friend who's into B-movies, it's just not a whole lot of fun. As I expected, he was still a little reluctant to go and we decided to wait on the release of the line-up of movies, which was released yesterday.

Originally, I had expected to get a look at the line-up and then hope that Dennis would change his mind and decide to go. But, when I skimmed the list of titles for 2006 I was actually a little disappointed myself. Earth Girls are Easy is just that: too easy. And the original King Kong? I know it's hokey, but come on, it's 73 years old this year! King Kong is probably one of the first big popcorn blockbusters of the entire film industry. It's like comparing Outlaw to UT2K4. Comparisons notwithstanding, Kong seemed a little gimmicky to me based on the current popularity of Peter Jackson's remake.

I will be a little sad to miss riffing on Graffiti Bridge and SuperBabies: Super Geniuses 2 in a public setting, but seeing as though there's only two movies I feel bad about missing out of thirteen coupled with the 75% price hike from 2005, I don't think I'll regret not going this year.

In other movie-viewing news, it is well known that my guilty cinematic pleasures are most satisfied through any kind of horror movie regardless of subgenre. Zombies are my favorite, slasher flicks are probably an easy second place finish, while gore for the sake of gore sidles into third. J-Horror is also catching up but I much prefer the original Japanese films to their American remakes. For instance, Ju-On was much more compelling than The Grudge, but I may make an exception with Kairo. I saw Kairo last year and I had trouble following it. I'm hoping that the American version titled Pulse will shed some light on what exactly was going on, without embellishing the original script for the American audience too much. I am probably expecting too much.

But, I digress. I brought up horror movies mostly to say that I saw Hostel last weekend and as horror movies go, it did not disappoint. When I see a horror movie, I have a pretty standard set of expectations that I take with me and as long as I'm not expecting cinematic genius, I can be satisfied as long as certain criteria are met. One: Are there zombies? If so, I'm automatically cool. Two: Is there a lot of blood, gore, or anything that makes my flesh crawl with disgust? Three: If there is little to no gore, is the film at least creepy? Four: The film doesn't take itself too seriously. One thing that horror movies are not is serious literary discussions. They require a great deal of that thing which boring, stuffy types lose over time: willing suspension of disbelief. I'd go crazy if every movie I saw needed to be some raw, shrewdly edited version of reality.

That being said, the reviews for Hostel gathered at Rotten Tomatoes are skewing more toward rotten than fresh the further time crawls away from the film's release date. But, this movies had enough blood and guts to last me for a while and it certainly agreed with some of my criteria above. My Achilles Heel (a couple of those get sliced in Hostel if you're wondering) when it comes to gory scenes usually involve eyeballs. Fulci's Zombie has a good eyeball scene, someone gets an injection in the eye in the Halloween series, and Hostel has a truly painful eyeball sequence that had me literally squirming in my seat with one eye open. I wasn't the only one either. I remember hearing a few tortured groans from the audience during that scene.

Hostel was a gory, fun time at the movies and I'm glad to see a resurgence in the genre that I loved so much in the '80s. I'm very interested to see what will be included in the invevitable unrated director's cut that will come DVD, although Amy said she was just fine with what we already saw.