“I lost most of my respect for Eli Roth after the self important horse shit he wrote into the Fangoria horror magazine where he portrayed himself as a free speech martyr and visionary artist being victimized by a ‘dangerous climate of political correctness’ because some letter writer said he says ‘faggot’ too much. That was a grade-A jackass move right there that will make it hard to take his movies seriously.”
-Vern, Ain’t It Cool News

About a month or two ago, I didn’t really give much thought to Eli Roth. I’ve better things to do with my time than concern myself with middling directors, job at a horror site or NO job at a horror site. He’d done one movie I hated and another I was kinda indifferent on. He ain’t really John Carpenter… But he ain’t Uwe Boll, either. Sure, his dialogue is forced… And his humor isn’t my style…

And he has a hard time creating tension, can’t create a sympathetic character to save his soul, he has a hard time with pacing…

(Pauses, sips water)

…some of the editing is amateurish, he can’t make his mind up on tone, he can’t handle his actors all that well, he goes for broad strokes that even Dickens would have found excessive, somehow manages to hop genres from scene to scene without getting up off his ass and can’t really tell an interesting story with a beginning a middle and an end, but really I’ve seen worse.

But he started getting my attention when advanced word was spreading about his THANKSGIVING trailer for the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino vanity project GRINDHOUSE. Everyone who watched it loved it, and this weird cloud of unanimous and sheepish consent blanketed the community of casual horror fans. In spite of the fact that those make me nervous in general, I watched it on youtube with an open mind… And remained unmoved. This uninspired and obvious two minutes of screen time had the capacity to bowl people in their right minds over?

But there were a couple of things I noticed watching that trailer, and I even went so far as to catch a few minutes of CABIN FEVER on a cable channel one night and these confirmed it: There is a HUGE streak of misogyny and homophobia present in all of his films. Women are demeaned at every turn and there are instances-o-plenty of the pejorative use of the word “Gay” and some reliance on the word “Faggot.” Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not some easily offended PC wuss, but Jesus Christ, Roth GOES OUT OF HIS WAY to do it! To me, rampant hatred of women and homosexual men only means one thing…

Eli Roth is probably gay.

I mean, think about it. If you refer to women as bitches and sluts in your movies and constantly show them as the harbingers of slow pain and rotting death… You can’t really be worried about wanting to get LAID by one of them. Kinda like these guys who grope women in favor of talking to them in hopes of getting a pity screw. It makes no sense and bespeaks either a poverty of common sense or a strong passion for male ass.

And homophobia in itself is a sure sign of a closet case. Why be hateful towards gay people if it doesn’t concern you? It’s like what Wanda Sykes said: “If you’re so worried about same sex marriage, then don’t get same sex married.” Could it be that your hatred for gay people is a fear for the gay dude within? If you’re not gay, then why does one obsess over it so? And also, the homosexual content played for laughs almost unaware of itself at some times. It’s like two guys saying “FUCK THEM QUEERS! Now let’s oil up and do squat-thrusts in front of each other!”

That and he’s kinda Danny Pintauro-ish… WELL, HE IS!

So I told a couple of people about this and they didn’t believe me, and this gave way to the article you’re reading now. I sat through every big screen work Roth has done and examined the films thoroughly for evidence in support of my theory. Below, you will find my examples.

Also, you will find many euphemisms for the word “vagina” because I am, in fact, an eight-year-old.

CABIN FEVER
WHAT I THOUGHT IN A NUTSHELL: When I saw this in the theatre in late 2003, it led to a lot of foot-tapping and watch-glancing. It’s the Scooby-Gang meets the Ebola Virus, complete with a dog and a dirty hippie. And with all the treks to town and back and not much else, it’s almost as boring as MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, only with fifty times the sneering, schoolboy irony and none of the refreshing camp value.

-How does the saga of Eli Roth begin? With A SHOT IN THE FUCKIN’ EYE, THAT’S HOW! Granted it’s blood as opposed to spooge, but it’s still a bit unseemly. I didn’t know plague-ridden dogs came pre-eviscerated.

-There’s a shot about twenty minutes in where Bert (James DeBello) just out of nowhere, starts pissing in the woods. Some will say that it’s there for comedic value, but being as he’s not pissing on or near anyone or anything, I don’t see how it’s funny. It was probably just an excuse for Roth to show some dude with his crank in his hand. And this is followed up in THE VERY NEXT SHOT with…

-A dude getting a finger jammed up his ass. There is a minor debate in private conversations amongst dudes about whether or not wanting a girl to cram her finger up your cornhole makes you gay. No, it makes you JOHN FUCKING WAYNE!

-More fun with Bert, where he says he one time got off with a dog licking his asshole… And he says it with such conviction, too.

-Including the Electric Six song “Gay Bar” on the PANCAKES featurette on the DVD? Yeah… Not helping.

-There’s a scene where Paul (Rider String) is in bed with Karen (Jordan Ladd) and he’s caressing her while she sleeps. He starts up at the top and works his hand under the covers. Judging from the way that she’s moaning, it’s obvious that Paul is doing some finger work on her Va-Jay-Jay-Walker… And his hand comes back up with plague-blood all over it. Not only is this a childish male fear of menstruation, but is the first instance of Roth’s apparent core theme throughout all his work: That PUSSY EQUALS DEATH!

HOSTEL
WHAT I THOUGHT IN A NUTSHELL: To be fair, ever since Roth attached himself like a remora to the side of Quentin Tarantino’s head, getting him to pay for his movies, Roth has become more technically proficient. To be fairer still, I liked HOSTEL the first time I saw it. But I saw it right after the awful WOLF CREEK and before the somehow WORSE remake of WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. The ensuing two times after that put things in perspective, inasmuch as hailing a horror movie as a social commentary on the basis of just ONE scene with Rick Hoffman is shallow and wrong… And torture is fucking BORING!

-Near the beginning, the Icelandic Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) is having sex with a woman in the bathroom of a club, and he gets the bright idea of taking a picture of himself while he’s doing it… Because that’s what we do, ladies… send pictures of ourselves with our pants around our ankles and our asses hanging out to our straight male friends.

-About five minutes later, more Oli goodness when he and Paxton (Jay Hernandez) are seen in silhouette in an Amsterdam Cathouse double-teaming a Dutch prostitute. Paxton’s in front of her, Oli’s behind, and the two men bump fists. “Dude, we’re three feet away from fucking each other! SWEET!” Now I’m not gonna be hypocritical about three-ways like every other straight dude on Earth but for Christ’s sake, keep your mind on what you’re doing.

-There’s the scene on the train with The Dutch Businessman (Jan Vlasak) touches Josh (Derek Richardson) on the thigh and he freaks out. TDB departs in embarrassment while Paxton and Oli pick on Josh for “finally hooking up.” Later, Josh meets up again with TDB and puts his hand on his thigh during conversation, reversing the role. Then TDB kills Josh in the torture compound…. Wow… There’s so much homophobia and puerile backpedaling about it on display here that my eyeballs almost detached from my ocular chords, I was rolling ‘em so fucking hard.

-There were quite a few instances with Oli in the sauna scene with Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova). So many that I’m just including Oli as a character. From drawing eyes on his bare asscheeks and using his bunghole to talk to people, to dry-humping Josh when he’s trying to score, to waving his shorn scrotum in front of his two supposedly straight male friends while screaming “I HAVE THE SMOOTHEST BALLS IN ALL OF ICELAND,” the character of Oli would be a big hit if Fire Island had a stand-up comedy circuit.

-Let’s take it to the actual torture warehouse itself. Is it just me, or is there something more than torture going on there? Where they have leather gear that you’re supposed to wear and they just have ball-gags LYING AROUND? Now S&M isn’t “gay” per se, as a lot of straight people do it as well, but I’m including it under the “Biker-In-The-Village-People” Clause… It’s a bylaw… Look it up.

-Svetlana and Natalya use sex to lure men to their slow and painful deaths. Now, I’m not opposed to women slaughtering men in the movies (or in real life, but that’s just me) but whatever happened to invention? Resourcefulness? Or just plain ol’ fuckin’ HATE? In HOSTEL, the message is clear: Any woman who will deign to sleep with a man is up to no good and will eventually try to fuck him over… And PUSSY EQUALS DEATH!

The THANKSGIVING Trailer
WHAT I THOUGHT IN A NUTSHELL: You give me two minutes, and I’ll give you a dirty joke!

-I don’t even need to say it, but the shot of the knife going into the Cheerleader’s “Mahmoud Poonaninejad.” For God’s sake, what did the vagina ever do to Eli Roth for him to hate it so?

HOSTEL PART 2
WHAT I THOUGHT IN A NUTSHELL: A full-length review can be found right here.

-I submit the entire movie as evidence against Eli Roth. There’s so much macho posturing and rampant misogyny that I both lost track and couldn’t find the words. And I wish anyone who argues this with me the best of luck not choking on their own bullshit.

Now are these unfair? Did I not get some of his attempts at irony or humor? Or worse yet, did I GET them and decide to use them against him anyway..? Maybe… I could have just written an article on how much I think Roth blows as a filmmaker, but where’s the fun in that? I’m just having a goof, while idly pondering. Kind of like an in-depth musing on how Hitchcock’s fear of authority figures or Peckinpah’s alcoholism affected THEIR work… Only with an unworthy subject.

But if Eli Roth REALLY IS gay?

Come out. PLEASE. If not for your work, then certainly for yourself. I for one cannot even fathom how hard it is to remain in the closet. To be ashamed of who you were born as and fearful that your family and your friends will turn on you just for who you are. It is a half-existence built on deceit and I’ll never even begin to understand how wearying, how damaging or how hard that must be. But think about your career. If you stand as the first gay major horror film director, you could bring a whole new audience to the genre. You could be a trailblazer. A HERO! But if your friends will turn on you for something that is inextricable form your nature, then they weren’t your friends to begin with and you’re better off without them. And your family will come around. And when you come out, it will feel like a huge weight came off your shoulders and your mind will become more resilient and sharper and maybe… Just maybe… If you come out…

Your movies won’t suck so Goddamn bad.

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