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January 10, 2006
One Day Closer to the Apocalypse: Lionsgate Plans 'Hostel' Sequel
Killing me: Eli Roth (right) and a brainwashed Takashi Miike on the set of Hostel (Photo: Lionsgate)
To be honest, nothing about Eli Roth's Hostel scared me quite as much as the inevitability of a sequel, and Variety's Pamela McClintock sends word this morning that my dull, throbbing fear will soon enough be realized:
After an opening weekend proving the multiplex is anything but a hostile environment, Screen Gems and Lionsgate are planning a sequel to Hostel, with writer-director Eli Roth in talks to return and steer the second installment.
Sadist-loving horror film bowed No. 1 at the box office, taking in $20.1 million.
Lionsgate and Screen Gems intend to release the sequel in a year, mimicking Lionsgate's successful quick turnaround of Saw and Saw II. ... It's not clear whether Hostel exec producer Quentin Tarantino will be back.
Now, I have burned thousands of calories over the past few days summoning the will to write about Hostel, the most offensively patronizing, boring and unscary "horror" picture since, well, ever. A lot of my aversion to covering Roth's latest stems from considering how much you already know about it. To wit:
--You know Hostel is the beneficiary of some fairly severe overexposure, from Roth's sloppy 69 with executive producer Quentin Tarantino in last week's New York Magazine to a P.R. campaign invoking the viewers who fainted at a festival screning last year in Toronto;
--You know that Lionsgate and Roth himself have hyped Hostel's unblinking depictions of violence and torture, as though horror meritocracy has realigned itself based on those qualities and not by mass-producing shitty exploitation flicks at school-musical budgets (indeed, Hostel raked in four times its production budget in its first week of release; its sequel, probably featuring Saw II-quality Z-listers working for scale, will cost even less);
--You know about Roth's repeated efforts to legitimize Hostel by namechecking (and even casting) Japanese influences like Takashi Miike, whose even more graphically rendered films like Audition and Ichi the Killer work because they inhabit a complex moral universe that Roth somehow mistakes for unqualified sadism;
--Finally, you know that the media have pretty much fallen for the whole goddamned thing--in some cases even attributing contemporary horror films' "return to their grisly, low-budget ’70s roots" in no small part to Hostel's pseudo-grindhouse spirit.
I guess I should say that most of the media have fallen for it. David Poland stole my thunder with last week's scatching write-up on The Hot Blog, in which he also raises what--with any luck--will emerge as the main hurdle facing Son of Hostel:
Really, this movie is so nothing that it could hurt Tarantino’s rep and it could really damage Lionsgate’s ability to market future Horror Porn, because the sales job makes it look so scary and the movie barely scratches the surface. Saw II may not have been great, but it wasn’t a lie. This film’s marketing is so misleading it makes David Manning look like a Pulitzer candidate.
That is being kind. But judging by Hostel's success, it appears that Lionsgate will get over again. This is the real triumph of cynicism: A company backed so far into its niche that it can only thrive on its customers' low expectations (and even stupidity, in the case of the Hostel franchise) to keep itself awash in revenue. And do not tell me about Crash--it is the same prevaricating, exploitative shit splattered instead with Paul Haggis's name and an ensemble cast.
This is me, sighing. Some antistudios never fucking change.
Posted by stvanairsdale at January 10, 2006 10:21 AM
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