someone, please raise the bar

Today's horror movies are more likely to be dripping with blood than irony, with films like "Wolf Creek," the "Saw" series and this week's "Hostel" representing a return to their grisly, low-budget '70s roots. -- CHRISTY LEMIRE Associated Press

Now, don't get me wrong...I love a good horror flick. But there just comes a point where enough is enough. I saw and liked "Saw". While it was a bit more grisly than my usual fare, I respected it's unique and fresh "flavor", if you will. It was something that hadn't been done before. It was smart, cunning, and took you by surprise. It was a film that kept on developing until the very end. (Can you believe the ending?!) But we're seeing a digression toward more gritty, raw, and disturbing movies with the release of "Hostel" and others.

While the "Scream" trilogy grossed hundreds of millions of dollars in the late 1990s with characters who winked at the camera in playful mockery of the genre's conventions, horror flicks like "Hostel," Eli Roth's follow-up to his gory 2003 debut "Cabin Fever," will show you a character whose eye is dangling from its socket after a long afternoon of torture.

"I think scary movies are back," Roth added. "People clearly don't want to see a horror movie to laugh."

Lions Gate Films apparently thinks so, too, having released several of the really grisly horror movies that have come out in the past few years: Rob Zombie's "House of 1,000 Corpses" and its sequel, "The Devil's Rejects," about a family of redneck serial killers; "Saw" and "Saw II," about a kidnapper who torments his victims with elaborate mind games; the French "High Tension," about two young women who are terrorized in the woods; and now "Hostel," which follows a trio of twentysomething guys on a European vacation that begins as an orgy of sex and drugs and descends into brutal, bloody sadism.

Read more here.

Yes, it's time to raise the bar.