"We have a friendly competition, and we have to keep in touch while we're making the films just to check on what scenes everyone is doing," Roth said of the club. He added that he reworked the script of "Hostel: Part II" and a scene of a girl getting her stomach-piercing jewelry ripped out when the filmmakers of the upcoming "Saw IV" cheerfully bragged that they had already covered that creative ground. It was a shame, Roth said.
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A queasy-does-it guy
Grown-up kid Eli Roth says his stomach-wrenching films tackle social ills too. Tell that to the usher cleaning the floor.
MOVIES
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday June 07, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
'Hostel': An article in Sunday's Calendar section about filmmaker Eli Roth said his film "Hostel" hit No. 1 at the box office in 2005. It was in early 2006.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday June 10, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 31 words Type of Material: Correction
'Hostel': An article in the June 3 Calendar section about filmmaker Eli Roth said his film "Hostel" hit No. 1 at the box office in 2005. It was in early 2006.
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"I had been looking for stuff you could do to girls that would be awful but not so horrifying that you felt like you couldn't watch it or you felt like you had been kicked in the stomach. I want people to be scared and walk away upset, but I don't want them to feel like they need to take a shower."
It's a fine line -- but that's "gorno" for you.
Best of the worst
HERE are some choice moments from the Roth highlight reel: A half-naked cheerleader on a trampoline does a leg split and lands, crotch-first, on a knife, in a spoof scene he contributed to "Grindhouse;" in the first "Hostel," a young woman loses an eye while she is being tortured with a blow-torch, but it still dangles from the socket -- until her rescuer uses scissors to snip it off.
There's another scene in the faux trailer he made for "Grindhouse" where a young guy with fresh-scrubbed features is parked in a convertible with his gum-chewing girlfriend. He talks her into performing oral sex on him but a heartbeat later she looks up to see that his head has been lopped off. Oh, by the way, in that last scene, Roth himself played the bad-luck lothario. He kept the head prop as a souvenir.
Roth describes his films with the pride of a young man who has just won the science fair and can't understand why everybody is so upset. Understanding his movies and its audiences, he said, is as simple as understanding the difference between a merry-go-round and a roller coaster. "If you're going to see a movie like 'Cheaper by the Dozen,' at the end you're supposed to feel good. The point of a horror movie is you're supposed to feel terrible."
Mixing blood and lust is a trademark of Roth and his contemporaries, as it was for the 1980s splatter films that influenced them. That has made him the target of women's groups and media-content commentators.
