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Eli Roth's Hostel is being described by some critics as "horror porn." That means it is exists to encourage and excite our baser appetites by serving up killings, mutilations, and torture—not to mention explicit scenes of sexual misbehavior—for our "entertainment." It's all designed to shock and to horrify audiences.

Guess what? Hostel is also the No. 1 film in America, tops at the box office. That means we're bound to see a lot more of this kind of thing over the next few years, in which other movies try to outdo Hostel—and the two Saw movies—with increasingly intense and explicit violence.

Hostel is about three hedonistic fools who indulge in all manner of unethical pleasures until they find themselves trapped in a game where others fulfill their own appetites for cruelty by torturing human beings and killing them in slow and grisly ways—decapitations, throats slit, heads smashed in, digits being cut off and body parts diced and tossed into a furnace, point-blank shootings, eyes being pulled from sockets, flesh drilled full of holes, a person throwing herself in front of a train, and more. It seems designed to delight people who share the unhealthy appetites of the movie's villains.

Nathan Lee of The New York Times says Roth's immature revelry isn't even good at scaring people. "Inspired by the brutal exploitation pictures of the 1970's and the nasty new breed of Asian horror films, Hostel is motivated by an adolescent urge to shock. And while it's true that no civilized person will remain unscathed by the film's relentless bigotry—this is one of the most misogynistic films ever made—Mr. Roth's gory spectacles are too calculated to deliver the transgressive jolts they so obviously seek."

We could only find one Christian film critic who bothered to suffer through the film (Christianity Today Movies opted to skip it). Marcus Yoars (Plugged In) says, "Days after seeing the film, I'm still wondering how it didn't get slapped with an NC-17 rating, because it pretends to be a porn flick for the first 45 minutes."

Yoars mentions how the filmmaker got the idea for the movie, and then sums up the film. "Roth was captivated with the warped notion that individuals could be so numb to the 'ordinary' vices of sex and drugs that they'd resort to inflicting extreme torture upon someone else as their next high. The result of his twisted fascination is grotesquely misshapen and transparently gratuitous."

Just as disturbing as the film's box office success is the fact that many mainstream critics are applauding it.

Alex is a 35-year-old video game tester who moves in with his grandmother, and before long, he and grandma's social circle are sitting around sipping marijuana tea. That's the premise for Grandma's Boy, another movie for the immature and misguided, now on the big screen.

Again, we found only one Christian critic who'd seen it. Steven Isaac (Plugged In) objects to the film primarily for the drug abuse onscreen. "Grandma's Boy opens with a 10-second scene from the classic arcade game Galaga. It's the only one worth watching. … A recent nationwide study of more than 6,500 children and 532 movies reports that 38% of smokers ages 10 to 14 started their cigarette habit after seeing it on the big screen. And that those who witnessed the most smoking onscreen were two-and-a-half times more likely to smoke than those who saw the least. I can only wonder if the same statistics apply to marijuana. Because we already know that lots of 10- to 14-year-olds see R-rated movies."

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January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50