Torture porn? Now that’s entertainment

Lock up your children! Tinseltown is about to unleash a new wave of horror movies, sicker and more violent than anything seen before outside sado- masochistic hardcore pornography.

Dubbed 'torture porn' by an American critic, it is so grotesque that a grassroots backlash is developing. One studio has been forced to take down 30 billboards in Los Angeles, many near schools, touting the film Captivity after complaints from outraged parents.

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez describes the four-panelled billboard like this: "Abduction, in which a terrified young blonde woman has either a gloved or black hand over her face, as if she's being kidnapped. Confinement, in which she's behind a chain-link fence and appears to be poking a bloody thumb through the fence. Torture, in which she is flat on her back, her face in a white cast, with red tubes that resemble jumper cables running into her nostrils. And Termination, in which her head dangles over the edge of a table, the murder complete."

"Hooray for Hollywood," concludes Lopez.

"The message is that this is what you do with women," says actress Lora Cain, after seeing the billboards. "You kidnap them, you confine them, you torture them and you kill them."

Just as shocking is that Captivity is directed by the British director Roland Joffe, a man who once had nobler aspirations in films like The Killing Fields and The Mission.

Growing concern about the new breed of horror films is also causing the Weinstein Company problems getting the requisite 'R' rating for its new film Grindhouse. This project is really two films, directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, both hardcore spoofs of violent 1970s exploitation horror movies. The films are separated by spoof trailers, including one for a 'film' called Werewolf Women of the SS.

"In one scene, a cute, topless girl is roughly tied down on a table by evil female Nazi experimenters... As she screams in agony, they brand her with a coal-hot steel swastika," says an industry insider who has seen the film. "And every girl in the Nazi concentration camp is topless."

'Torture porn' originated a few years ago with low-budget independent gore films like Saw, Wolf Creek and Hostel. Those films, which cost barely a million dollars to produce, were so successful - the first three made more than $400m at the box office - that they spawned numerous sequels and copycats.

Hostel: Part II will be released in June, Saw 4 is now in production, and other horrors due for release    

include Borderland and Delirium. They invariably feature young men and beautiful young women, usually topless or nude, being subjected to torture and physical dismemberment. After the serial killer slices through the heroine's spinal cord in the movie Wolf Creek, he says, gleefully: "Now you're just a head on a stick."

Not everyone believes such hardcore horror fare is harmful.

"These movies are rites of passage for adolescents in developed societies," says Adam Simon, director of The American Nightmare, a documentary about modern horror films. "They offer teenagers psychological strategies for dealing with the trials of adolescence and coming to terms with the horrors of our world, such as the torture at Abu Ghraib and the videos many of them have seen on the internet of jihadist beheadings."

So that's the excuse. ·