Excessive gore and violence; or, why the movie "Hostel" should not exist

Commercials for the movie Hostel are on TV an awful lot, and the last time my sister said that she wanted to go see it. So I found myself trying to express how unneccesary I think that movie is. Maybe I'll do a better job here.

I understand that "Hostel" is a horror movie. I understand that Quentin Tarentino has a certain style of movie making. But there doesn't seem to be much behind the plot of the movie other than luring people to a hostel to torture and kill them. It's not that I can't handle violence. Behead a couple orcs? Great! The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan? That was fairly uncomfortable and made me a little nauseous. But nothing has made me physically flinch as much as the sequences in the commercials, particularly the shot of the clippers on the toe.

I always find torture hard to watch, when those scenes appear in movies. Braveheart. And in Three Kings, when they force oil into Matt Damon's character's mouth. What makes the difference between horror movies like Scream and these are that in the slasher movies, there's always an element of...over-the-top-ness. The killer's disguise, how stupid the victims behave... But torture is very real. It's happened probably since the beginning of time, it is happening now, somewhere in the world, and it will probably happen in some form until humans can rise above their capacity to harm others. It's not something that happens in blind rage, like murder; it's a deliberate desire and choice to hurt someone, to cause them pain. (And no country that claims to respect human dignity can countanence its use, no matter what the circumstances. Please, Bush, just sign the no-torture agreement.)

What makes Hostel particularly horrible is not only that it focuses on torture, but it specifically markets torture as the motivation to see the movie! One commercial warns people who don't like blood, who are afraid of the dark, etc. to see another movie. In effect, it is endorsing torture--as entertainment! I don't care how effectively you can scare people by showing them these things, it's still not right. Why don't you show news footage of actual torture? How entertaining is that? It's just horribly wrong to use as the focal point of a movie, and I'm really disgusted by it. I hope it bombs, I hope no one makes any money from it. Let's all go see something with real entertainment instead.

P.S. Another reason torture is worse than just killing is that it is possible to kill from far away, which creates distance, making it possible to justify the act, or pretend that it wasn't a person you're harming. You can't torture someone long distance, though; you have to be close to them, intimate, making that choice. Horrible.