[Daemonia]

Oh, I'm not averse to gore in horror movies, far from it - and I'm not even complaining really about the gore in modern horror films. It's just the fact that they seem to offer little else. The 80's wave of splatter movies at least had an uncurrent of sleaziness and depravation that made them unsettling and were, to some degree, fairly believable. But the Saw films...well...we're expected to believe, in the later sequels, that a corrupt cop has the time to front as a bona fide policeman whilst at the same time able to secretly acquire huge derelict buildings, build complex, elaborate traps, and never seems to ever sleep. His technical wizardry must know no bounds! Come on, it's really stretching credibility now. The first couple were good, solid psychological-horror films though.

Hostel I absolutely hated. It's the same old American thing of treating foreign countries as dangerous places to be. Why couldn't it happen in the USA? Why does it have to be some suspicious Eastern European country? And Roth is so fixated on filming 'babes' for the first hour he practically forgets he's supposed to be making a horror film. Hostel 2 was more of the same. And in interviews at the time, Roth seemed more excited that he'd got laid as a result of being successful than he was at having made a film. Shows where his heart is, I suppose.

Of course there are some great films out there and I've enjoyed the new wave of French horror immensely. But overall, it's been a looooong time since a film has truly unnerved me or unsettled me. So please don't think I'm against all modern horror, I'm not. But the likes of Hostel, the later Saw entries and Captivity just tend to bore me rather than thrill me. They just pile on the gore in the absence of coherent and intelligent storytelling.