The best thing actually about the 1408 DVD was the trailer I saw for the movie "Black Sheep." I highly recommend watching this trailer.
Black Sheep Trailer

1408 (2007)

1408 is just out on DVD at Blockbuster. It was good. It was scary. A lot of things played off of The Shining, the whole creepy scary hotel thing. And this is based on a short story by Steven King also, so that makes sense. The Shining meets 13 Ghosts meets __ - something familiar, when I think of it I'll let you know. John Cusack is well cast and miscast. He's sort of not scary enough, to me anyway. Although I liked him and was surprised at him in Identity. This kind of felt like he's bored with it already. Samuel Jackson was great as always.

Hostel 2005

OK, I'm probably the last person with an interest to see this movie. I only knew about it because my Internet Technology students at AI recommended it (this was like 2 years ago, talk about living under a rock). OK, some of the male students recommended it, and some of the famale students were like, it's just slasher crap.

I beg to differ. I loved it, having finally seen it.

But before I talk about Hostel, let me talk about my new local Blockbuster. I just joined Blockbuster under duress, because it's 2 blocks away and I'm trying to get to know the neighborhood, and Dish Network does not offer a particularly good deal on Satellite combined with Internet. So help me, I'm going with Verizon for DSL, and I don't want to get further into it than that.

But the important thing is, this blog was based on Cable horror, and as the previous posts will indicate, cable horror actually full on sucks. I think I was living in the 80's or something, where cable was a good place for horror. But come to find out, Blockbuster is a good place for horror. I never would have thought Blockbuster because when I lived in New York, Blockbuster was the conservative regime where even regular dumb movies were only available in their more dumber edited form. Subversive Blockbuster in my neighborhood has more horror than I can shake a stick at, and I don't know what to make of it. But I will just let sleeping dogs lie and do my best to not call too much attention.

Now back to Hostel. As opposed to a Rob Zombie flick, which is about 70-80% gore to 20-30% story, this was more like 70-80% story and 20-30% gore, so fine by me and probably explainable in that Tarantino was a producer. I will be researching Eli Roth the director in the near future as well. I understand he's from Massachusetts.

OK, so there are 3 main characters, a super moral American guy who's blonde and dorky (Derek Richardson as Josh) , a wordly American guy who's dark and could be in cultural background Middle Eastern or South American (Jay Hernandez as Paxton). And he also speaks fluent German. Plus a morally corrupt party boy/man from Iceland (Eythor Gudjonsson as Oli).

Who do you think buys it first? Who lives? I was surprised. What gets them in trouble though, is the pursuit of, and for lack of a better word I'm going to go out on a limb here, pussy. Pretty much the Icelandic guy is a party guy like I said. The wordly guy likes pussy. The moral guy had a bad breakup. The wordly guy is out to get the bad breakup guy some pussy to get his mind off things.

Flagrant desire for pussy is definitely the primary first level underlying moral corruptness in a downfall here, so I wouldn't call it just gore. There's a morality tale here too. And the next level of punishment is basically for being a person of the first world and then naively leaving your safe zone. Because the Americans are the most sought after prey but the Japanese seem also to be very valuable. So actually you can probably tie in the pussy with the Ugly Americanism to equal comeuppance for exploiting foreign women, especially those of Eastern Europe in this case.

So I have to say I like the theme of comeuppance for exploiting women (and particularly 3rd world women but also 3rd world men), because so many gore flicks are so superficially punishing women simply for being sexual beings. And that's probably an oversimplification because I think the gore flicks are often anti-sex in general for both women and men (such as Halloween, Friday the 13th). Although if you look at the stuff from the 70s like Maniac, I think they take it out a little more on the ladies.

Anyway, I'm so glad I watched Hostel. I thought it was very entertaining. And switched to Blockbuster. I can't recommend either one enough.