How I adore this time of year. Crisp temperatures, rediscovered sweaters, picturesque woodlands, and carte blanche to watch marathons of vile and twisted slasher flicks. I’m not talking about the modern mainstream attempts, with their smokescreen marketing, ludicrous dialogue and casts ripped straight from the “Just Get Through Your Lines as Quickly as Possible and Maybe No One’ll Notice” school of acting. Ninety minutes of crappiness peppered with enough CGI gore to fill your stomach with corrosive acid-froth – that’s hardly appealing. No, I mean the horror archetypes, with their rigid formulas, chaste final girls and unapologetic depravity. What’s not to admire about Clive Barker’s throbbing polyp close-ups or Craven’s long pans over piles of squashed entrails, the entire screen always seconds away from erupting into oozing puss? How many ways can you love Heather Langenkamp’s smug overbite or Adrienne King’s dogged purity?

A few recent heroines have spiced up the mix, turning preconceptions on their severed heads, finally letting horror movie chicks cut loose (God that pun is terrible. Should I keep it? Absolutely). This film is by far the sickest thing I’ve seen in years – it’s a simple but undeniable fact that no low-budget Leatherface sequel can come close to the revulsion-factor of a hot blonde French woman eviscerating bystanders with a power saw. And this belongs in the DVD library of any woman ever scorned. A grown man, castrated on screen by a 14-year-old? Final Girl my ass. For extra fun, watch it in a room with as many men as possible, and draw a chart ranking their respective shades of pale. Suddenly, “Hostel” is starting to look like “Field of Dreams.” Eli Roth, get thee back to a Misogynist’s Anonymous meeting and leave the real disturbing to the experts.

Ok, now back to Asia blogging.