Author: Ric Meyers

As author of For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (as featured in People magazine and the National Enquirer [when the National Enquirer was the National Enquirer]) and the original head writer for Fangoria magazine, don’t get me wrong: I love horror films. Of course what I’m dealing with in this installment are not horror films, no matter how often the filmmakers and actors refer to them as such. Horror is fear of the unknown. These are terror flix, involving the fear of the known.

But I dabble in semantics, which is only fitting because semantics are crawling all over the ample special features on the DVDs for the two-disc Hostel: Director’s Cut, and the single disc Hostel Part II: Unrated Director’s Cut – both of which are dragging their tortured carcasses into stores October 23rd.

First things first. If you loved Hostel, the overkill (all puns intended) of the Director’s Cut edition will leave you writhing in bloody delight. To give you an idea just how much you need to love it, there are four, count ‘em, four, audio commentaries – every single one with director/producer/writer Eli Roth, each supplemented with different friends; from “Presenter” Quentin Tarantino to aintitcoolnews.com honcho Harry Knowles. Yes, they expect you to watch the movie four times as Roth brings in producers, executive producers, and others to tell you what they did and how much they liked it.

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Here’s the story – apocryphal, unsubstantiated, and questionable as it is.

Quentin Tarantino announces he’s going to make the ultimate exploitation flick – a quintessential slasher movie (i.e., with a gruesome death every seven minutes), only with cars instead of knives. Not only that, but he’s going to return Kurt Russell to the pantheon of screen badasses in the process.

However, somewhere along the way, someone supposedly turned down the vaunted director/writer’s advances with a statement along the lines of: “No way. I can see by your movies that you have no sensitivity towards, nor understand, women.”

Tarantino’s rumored reaction is the new, “improved” vision of his loving exploitation “homage” – Death Proof, which was his anchor of Grindhouse – the anthology film buoyed by Robert Rodriquez’s far more spirited contribution, Planet of Terror. But the woeful box office receipts necessitated a rethink, so only Death Proof came out this week as an “Extended and Unrated” DVD Special Edition.

Having been shocked and amazed by the original butt-numbing theatrical version, I approached this DVD with extreme caution – hoping that I would be pleasantly surprised, but fairly certain that my worst fears would be realized. For you see, Death Proof was, and, it turns out, still is, two films in one. A half hour kick-ass revenge thriller, and, in its original theatrical form, a one hour off-Broadway play which could’ve been called Four Chicks Sitting ‘Round Yakkin’ ‘Bout Nothin’.

Now, you’ll be relieved to note, the DVD is still two films in one – a half hour kick-ass revenge thriller, an integral, ten minute lap dance sequence inexplicably omitted from the original film, and, an off-Broadway play called Four Chicks Sitting ‘Round Yakkin’ ‘Bout Nothin’ for a Full 80 Minutes!

Yes, rather than be true to his pre-release publicity, Tarantino has added not more slasher car scenes, not more badass Russell sequences, but more talking … about nothing … that has no relation to the stated purposes of a film called Grindhouse other than showing the rumored rejector that boy, Tarantino sure understands and appreciates women in spades!

As author of the book For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films, I was a bit, shall we say, miffed by the writer/director’s cavalier treatment of the genre, although I certainly appreciated his half-hour of valid homage, despite the labored way he set up the situations. It was all the more annoying since he had the makings of a sweet stuntman vs. stuntman thriller in there, but it, like almost anything else legitimately entertaining, was swept away in his desire to show anyone who’d deny him that he adores every word he can put in any woman’s mouth.

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