The 1996 Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie riffed on This Island Earth (1955--funnily enough, the first movie my high school friends and I chose to inaugurate our semi-regular movie nights in 1989 or 1990) and did nothing with its funniest line. I still gape.

 At what point do certain movies make the leap to being good? I wonder...

 Hostel (2005): An online acquaintance of mine had a high enough opinion of Hostel 2 that I've decided to ignore its practically universal critical damnation and watch it eventually. First, though, I figured I should watch Hostel to make sure. I didn't think I'd like it very much, but it managed to be rather... I shrink from the term "good," as it's a classic aughties case of style over substance, but some of the style is pretty decent. It's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be, let's put it that way. Three massive dipshits--two Americans and their Icelandic buddy--are in Amsterdam further dragging the Republic's name in the mud. Anyone who's ever had to spend any time in close proximity to college campuses or sports bars will recognize Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) immediately. Of course, being Americans in Amsterdam, the only thing they can think to do is hit the hash bars and whorehouses. They meet Alexei, a roguish Russian (probably) who tells them about the unsurpassed fleshpots of, yes, Bratislava. So, as you or I would, on the first suggestion of some guy they meet after missing curfew, they immediately change their travel plans from Barcelona to Slovakia (Oh, the hell with New Orleans--let's go to Toronto!). Admittedly, things seem to look up at first, with a comically better hostel than the Dutch can apparently offer. They end up quartered with two pathologically slinky Slavic beauties who take them to the spa and then the disco, and that's when people start disappearing. Hostel was directed by up-and-coming auteur Eli Roth, a director widely disparaged for being all style and no substance. This is largely true, but if the style works, I'm willing to forgive a few things. I certainly wasn't expecting this to be The Wicker Man or Don't Look Now (both of which wind up clumsily--yet effectively--"referenced" in Hostel). The sense of location is fantastic; I don't know if it was actually filmed in Bratislava (Prague seems a better guess), but there's a nice mix between the post-milennial sheen of Amsterdam and the post-Communist grunginess (and faded Habsburg grandeur) of the former Czechoslovakia. The big red flag for many critics was the question of "torture-porn," and, yes, there are some very grisly scenes during the movie (as well as stupid and occasionally offensive plot points). I found myself baffled, though, as much of it isn't terribly worse than a lot of other stuff that's come out over the last four decades (five, if you count Mario Bava, or--if you must--Herschell Gordon Lewis), and it doesn't take up a lot of screen time either, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at most (and this scattered throughout the movie).  The characters start as douchebags, and I love that Josh is supposed to be an aspiring writer (not that I don't believe he is--I've known some sacks whove gone on to moderately successful and intensely localized literary careers)--"Prague? Oh, yeah, Kafka's cool." Paxton's apparently the less sensitive one, and does have a marvelous line of dialogue when encouraging Josh to be a little more adventurous in the space-age Amsterdam brothel: "When I'm studying for the bar exam, and you're doing your thesis, this... is what we'll think about." Aim to fail, fellas. After Oli ("the Viking") vanishes, though, Paxton and Josh start to show a little believable humanity, which makes this thing better than it might have been, and a few creepy character turns by the villains add a nicely sinister touch. So, it's no masterpiece, but it looks really good, and is way better than Saw, but surprisingly slightly below former Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider's Strangeland (1994).

Scarecrow Gone Wild (2004): "If you say 'let's split up,', I'll bitch-slap the pair of you!" A long time ago, the Meijer on Ann Arbor-Saline Road held a colossal clearance sale of an Alexandrine library's worthh of cheap DVDs, of which I barely took advantage. I promised myself the next time it happened that I wouldn't be nearly so chary of loading up on what promised to be hugely entertaining crap, and found another chance a few weeks ago, just before I saw Cloverfield, at the location on Carpenter Road. I wound up with four, one of which was Scarecrow Gone Wild. The basketball players at what looks like a tremendously run-down state university satellite decide to go hit the beach one weekend, but not before running some of the going-on-thirty freshmen out to the cornfield for a little haz--I mean, "instilling character and upholding tradition." Paul (Matthew Linhardt), one of the team's stars, is practically blood brothers with Sam (Caleb Roerhig), one of the freshmen, and encourages him to ask lovely Beth (Samantha Aisling) out on a date. No sooner does he do this than the rest of the team drag Sam off to the cornfield, and Paul and Beth take to running around campus and making out in a gazebo; some real friendship right there. The team, though nominally run by the coach (Ultimate Fighting luminary Ken Shamrock, billed on the DVD case as "The Most Dangerous Man Alive," with an indescribably funny expression on his mug), seems to take its orders from Mike, who appears to be fighting both a Napoleon complex and an "outie." Why a cornfield? Well, there's this legend, see, that some scarecrow took on the soul killed in the cornfield and now he goes around... killing people. Sam's hypoglycemic, and you can sort of guess where this is all going. I was fully prepared to find Scarecrow Gone Wild utterly loathsome, but it was really far more entertaining than it had any right to be. There's the usual bucketload of unintentional laughs (at one point, the pathos in Paul and Sam's relationship threatens to turn into a "Lifetime Original Movie"), but there are a few genuinely funny bits as well, and writer-director Brian Katkin (who wrote some of the music--never a good idea, ask John Carpenter--along with some band called the Filthies) sems to know his audience rather well. One cast member death is particularly welcome. While certainly not good, it's short, fast, and well-paced; I was never bored. The DVD is from York Productions, an outfit also responsible, according to the "previews" extras, for Aquanoids (which actually looks like a lot of fun) and Alien 51 (which doesn't--it stars Heidi Fleiss as some sort of carnival ring-mistress and has that weird late-80s B-movie feel to it). I remember being afraid at one point that the decline of VHS would result the death of in movies like these, but thankfully I needn't have worried.