For weeks and weeks, all the weekend box office charts have been to do with Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and King Kong.
The recent weekend box office domination of these films is all well and good, but there’s been something missing from them. While magic teenagers fighting dragons, Jesusy lions and ice skating monkeys are pleasing to families, there was an audience that was being sadly neglected – the audience that enjoys seeing graphic images of people’s intestines being yanked out and splattered around by a chainsaw. And that’s why Hostel is the new US weekend box office number one.
Hostel, the latest movie by Cabin Fever (DVDs) director Eli Roth, is
proving to be the perfect box office antidote to all the overlong
wintery family wizard/monkey/goat-man-thing movies that have
overpowered the weekend box office chart over the last month or so.
Hostel sounds like one of the most relentlessly gory and graphically
disturbing films ever to come out of America, including scenes of
slashed Achilles tendons, blow-torched faces, eye-slicing,
throat-cutting, head-exploding, hot East European boy on girl action
and a practical sequence that teaches audiences how to make a perfectly
moist battenburg cake. OK, we’re kidding. There’s no eye-slicing.
Here’s the full US weekend box office chart…
1 – Hostel (So Hostel is a full on gore-fest that will frighten,
disgust and appal you in ways that will stay with you for the rest of
your life. A bit like that photo of Pete Burns‘ giant, pus-oozing lips
that got shown on Celebrity Big Brother the other night. But less
horrific, obviously) $20,100,000
2 – The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
(We’ve almost got the hang of this now. Aslan is Jesus, the children
are the disciples, the Witch is the Devil and that crazy old Jim
Broadbent Professor is Noah, or the burning bush or something. OK, we
give up) $15,427,000
3 – King Kong (Maybe King Kong would have done better if the movie
studio had marketed it as That Film Where A Giant Penis Tries To Chew
Off Billy Elliot’s Arm) $12,466,000
4 – Fun With Dick And Jane (The film that started the debate – Which
Fun With Dick And Jane movie is better: the one with Jim Carrey and Tea
Leoni or the one with That Bloke From Just Shoot Me and Barbarella?)
$12,200,000
5 – Cheaper By The Dozen 2 (Maybe the Cheaper By The Dozen films
would be more popular if they took a leaf out of Hostel‘s book and
showed scenes of Steve Martin being tortured until he promised to make fewer rubbish films about being a long-suffering Dad) $8,300,000
6 – Munich (Whereas maybe Munich could have reached the heady
box office heights of Cheaper By The Dozen 2 by featuring more long suffering Dads
in charge of crazy families and less Israelis and Palestinians and
stuff) $7,455,000
7 – Memoirs Of A Geisha (Pay £7.50 to see an Asian woman dancing in
a sexy way? When there are so many free websites that let you do the
same thing from the comfort of your home?) $6,000,000
8 – Rumour Has It (Rumour has it that if the cast of Friends make
any more crappy films, Friends will be back on TV before we know it)
$5,881,000
9 – Brokeback Mountain (Wait a minute – gay cowboys??) $5,750,000
10 – The Family Stone (The film that will go down in history as
having the 652nd best opening weekend of all time! Woo!) $4,625,000
Read more:
Weekend box office: January 6 – 8 2006 – Box Office Mojo
[story by Stuart Heritage]