Am I crazy? Did no-one else think this film was that deep? If nothing else, I thought it was a really solid old-school horror flick full of shades of moral grey... the feral kids were a master stroke, and while I wished there was less silicon (I recall the boobies looking fake, and I worked in porn for a while, so I have a good eye) and that the seductresses weren't as skeletally thin, I came out of Hostel convinced I'd just seen a whole different kind of movie.

But now it's chicks being tortured? I'll adopt a wait-and-see attitude, but I'm not as excited as I was for this sequel.

Great statue, though...

As far as "torture porn" goes, I thought the Hills Have Eyes remake was an example of sadism for sadism's sake... that was really a cruel and unpleasant movie. Hostel wasn't that horrifying or unpleasant.

Maybe the people constantly harping on Roth are jealous, because he seems like a film geek who succeeded in the biz? This isn't me saying "shut up until you've made a better movie," but it's the best explanation I can think of for the vitriol directed at someone who strikes me as a relatively inoffensive individual who seems committed to making good genre flicks. Whatever you think of his films so far, isn't his success something the average film geek should find inspiring and worthy of respect?

He may have been hyped by this site and other media, and his work may not have yet lived up to that hype, in your opinion, but why is that a reason to call him a hack?

That said, Hostel WAS above and beyond other recent horror movies... the composition and the ending, with the protagonist's face reflected in the train window, the aimless empty existential horror of it all... Hostel had the cool creepy vibe of an old Fulci flick, with more polish and coherence.