Eli Roth

A gore merchant isn't born, he's made. Consider the case of Eli Roth, whose gory, lucrative films are often described as "torture porn" or with an especially pungent new term: "gorno." This Friday, Roth's latest, "Hostel: Part II," will land in theaters with a splatter -- the plot finds three nubile coeds trapped in an Eastern European sadism club where fiends on vacation pay to slowly carve up strangers. If the thought of watching that makes you nauseated, well, Roth can understand.

It could be eye-opening to have film students construct a script entirely around the cautionary warnings assigned by the MPAA ratings board. Eyes are opened (and then some) in Eli Roth's latest carnival of dismemberment, "Hostel," which seems to have been tailored to its designated R "for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use." Class, how can we fulfill the requirements of this something-for-everyone menu? Draw from your own life, if it helps.

THE piece on the director of the "Hostel" films, Eli Roth, was eye-opening to say the least. Trying to defend this gore as a generational and "artistic" response to the politics of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is reductive and irresponsible, with a skewed perspective on cause and effect. Roth's psychiatrist father may dismiss criticism for accompanying the young Eli to horror films as "bourgeois," but I have a different take: A parent who would allow an 8-year-old to watch "Alien" is a borderline psychopath and is also very likely to raise one. JOE ALLEGRETTI \o7Santa Barbara \f7 I find any promotion of a guy like Eli Roth despicable.

HAVE you seen a new breed of response letters written to the L.A. Times? They're called hateful [Letters, June 10 and 17]. Shame on you, Joe from Santa Barbara, for calling Eli Roth's parents "borderline psychopath." And shame on you, Raymond from Westlake Village, for using the words "mental illness." And shame on you, Suzanne from Los Angeles, for calling Eli a "jackal." Eli Roth is one of the most talented and promising young directors the horror genre has witnessed in years. Like Eli, I too was 8 when my life changed (thanks to the horror genre)

Friday the 13th. Midnight. There probably couldn't be a more appropriate time for the L.A. premiere of the new horror film "Cabin Fever," screening in the Independent Feature Project/Los Angeles Film Festival. The feature debut from director and co-writer Eli Roth is a willful, knowing throwback to the sex-and-gore films of the late 1970s and early '80s, leavened with a dose of "Evil Dead"-style humor.