"The Strangers" Meets "The Descent," Hello Torture Porn?

So part of the charm of having satellite TV is watching films (usually late at night, when I can’t sleep) that I would never see in the theatre, but what the heck. Who made this movie The Strangers, and why? It’s certainly scary and foreboding early on, but like many other ‘torture porn’ flicks, it gradually descends into murder and mayhem that seems seriously pointless. This is (obviously) The Point at the end of the film, after Liv and her feckless husband (who finds a shotgun and a barrel of shells, only to shoot the wrong person) are killed and bloody. I felt sorry for Liv Tyler in that final scene, when she is being slowly, inexorably stabbed to death. The last I saw of her she was wearing Star Trek ears and puppydog eyes in that idiotic The Lord of the Rings. (How that won Best Picture . . . .) I’m sure she’d rather lose her virginity again against the backdrop of gorgeous Italian vistas like in Stealing Beauty. I’m well aware of the old Aristotelian song & dance about tragedy exciting terror and pity, causing a sense of catharsis, and yes, it’s valid. But the couple in The Strangers really aren’t tragic heroes, or are so only loosely. They fit the ordinary yuppies category. The killers are creepy but not particularly diabolical: mainly they walk around slowly in masks. I don’t get the slow-walking killer in movies like Halloween etc. Jeez, I’d just book it out of there. I will give the movie this: I kept wanting to turn it off, but I couldn’t, compelled to watch the mayhem to the end, the final shots of the isolated suburban home on a quiet, hohum morning, with the killers driving away, scotfree.
The Descent, on the other hand, is another horror movie in the torture porn category that is worth watching, if you can stomach it. It features a plucky band of chickflick heroines going caving somewhere in Appalachia. (Admission: I’m a former caver and know something about this sport. There are big caves in Appalachia, so on that point, it’s accurate. However, I’ve never seen that many good looking women dirty in a cave before.) They soon encounter a race of cannibilistic cave people and proceed to fight them tooth and nail. (Like who hasn’t done that before?) Here’s where the torture porn comes in: Some of the footage of the babes being gobbled up by the cannibals is awfully graphic and gruesome. But as horror movies go, it’s pretty good. Predictably one of the babes survives, and when she turns her back on The Competitive Babe and lets the cannibals have her for dinner, it’s morally queasy at best, pretty horrible over all. Both are cycling into the endless repetition of sat TV fare.