Captivity: Is Torture-Porn Dead?

Based on the poor box-office performance of Hostel 2 and Captivity, pundits everywhere are cheering at the death of the "torture-porn" subgenre of horror. Because of this, expectations and marketing for Saw IV are being cut back, and numerous other torture-porn films that were in the pipeline are being canceled.

So is torture-porn dead? I beg to differ. A quick look around the web at porn sites (and yes, I look a lot) shows the genre to be thriving. I think it's more a case of the same things that have slowed ticket sales industry-wide. I mean, who wants to pay $20 to sit in a cramped seat, listening to people cough and talk while you're trying to observe someone's head being slowly crushed! Seriously! Pipe down, you clod, we're trying to watch hot metal pincers rip out someone's vajayjay, and you're totally spoiling the mood! And the price of popcorn? That's more painful than what those incestuous mutants onscreen are doing to those men.

It could also be a case of "why buy the cow when you've got a hemophiliac virgin hanging upside down in the basement at home to slaughter, anyway?" If the popularity of torture-porn on the internet is any indication, people probably have their own victims tied up in lethal predicaments being filmed right in their own homes. Those poor souls are likely trapped in situations that are much more creative and messy than anything Hollywood could cook up in their ivory towers, far-removed from the streetwalkers you and I are abducting.

So, is torture-porn dead? No, it may be in a slump, and seemingly redundant and stagnant when compared to the many instruments of suffering its audience employs on a nightly basis on wayward Czech tourists. But all it needs is new innovation (can you say, "giant flaming corpse blender"?) to capture people's imagination, and it'll come staggering right back to the top, oozing putrid diseased lymphatic fluid to and fro, until it collapses and is devoured by rats.

Unmatched

Match.com is running a commercial promising that if you don't find a match within six months, they'll give you six months free.

Wait a minute. You just wasted half a year trying to find a mate on there, and failed miserably. The last thing on earth you need is to spend another six months sitting in front of your computer and weeping because every guy you find is sexually attracted to elves. Why the hell would you want to endure that, when virtually any other avenue (singles bar, church mixer, flashing a hobo) would surely prove more fruitful in that case? So you can ring in a new year after that knowing that for all of 2007, even prisoners were getting more action than you? After all, it's shower time at least once a day in jail.

CSI: Whitman's Sampler Division

I want to see a crime show where the detective announces they're going to get samples from the suspect, then proceeds to pull chocolate after chocolate from the perp's mouth and match them to the shapes in a plastic mold.

"Yep, it's a match. Hazelnut."

Jumping the Shark

Having a toddler means spending actual discussion time debating the point where Dora the Explorer jumped the shark. Was it when Diego appeared? Or whey they finally got the budget to add two more stock animation poses to her repertoire?

Personally, I think it was the episode where she bought a motorcycle and leaped over the tank of sharks in the Arnold's parking lot.

To Cheesfinity, and Beyond

At some point in the late 90's, "Nacho Cheese" Doritos weren't cutting it anymore. Our cheese-infusing technology had reached the point where we could squeeze more powdered-cheese flavor onto a tortilla chip than ever before, and yet we weren't taking advantage of this culinary windfall. And so, "Nacho Cheesier!" Doritos were born, and everything was good.

About ten years on now, do we really need to keep the "-ier!" part of the flavor naming? Does anyone even remember life or the chips before the extra cheese? Has "Cheesier!" grown stale and everyday enough to just become our new normal "cheese" flavor?

I posed this question to Doctor Werner von Fromage, of the Institute of Cheesiness Studies, and this is what he wrote to me.

Guten Tag, Herr Yuenger! You ask whether it is necessary to call the Doritos product "Nacho Cheesier!," when it is now simply what we all accept as the normal level of "Nacho Cheese". The same question could well be asked about "Cooler Ranch" Doritos, for are they still so infinately cooler as to need to be advertised as such?

Here at the Institute of Cheesiness Studies, we say, "Nein!" For you see, we are always striving to expand the bounds of cheese-flavor technology. We are always in the process of becoming cooler and ever-cheesier, and for us, we can never advise settlement with the cheese offerings of today. Would you have us freeze our technology at the vacuum-tube, never to move on to the transistor? Do not be foolish! Why should we stop in this primitive era of cheese flavorings, when we have only achieved powder densities per centimeter that would make a man of the future weep with hostility at our patheticness?

To us, the "Cheesier!" (complete with exclamation point) is an ever-shifting goal, an enticement to us to strive for that Platonic singular true form of Cheesy. Perhaps someday our taste buds will experience the epitome of cheese, and will not physically be able to process any more flavoring in a single bite. Your nervous system will collapse in cheese-induced shock, and you will drown in your own saliva. But we have not reached that time! And so, there is still work to be done.

Yours truly,
Dr. Werner von Fromage
Institute of Cheesiness Studies
Zurich, Switzerland

Whew! That explains it.