Back in March, I asked if a movie like 300 might have a chance to wake Hollywood from its half-decade of artistic slumber, and concluded:

Obviously, not in the short term. With the exception of Spider-Man 3, virtually all of the innumerable trailers yesterday before 300 highlighted Hollywood's current phase: dank, gross, low-budget nihilistic horror films, and, in a very similar genre, the latest effort by Quentin Tarantino, which featured the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)

Brent Bozell has some thoughts on this new genre of "torture porn":

As long as there’s been a Hollywood, there have been “horror” movies. But what qualifies as horror in the eyes of today’s horror movie manufactures is altogether different from anything Alfred Hitchcock considered as art.

Take Darren Bousman, director of the forthcoming horror flick "Saw IV." He eagerly told MTV.com that in his new movie, "There is a scene...where I physically regurgitated in my mouth...There is stuff in this movie that I’m dying to see whether it gets past the MPAA [ratings board]." Scenes that make the directors vomit make them happy? Bousman told a horror-movie website he’s looking forward to his next movie, a horror-film-meets-musical: "There’s nudity; there’s violence; there’s tons of hot girls; there’s breaking out in song while ripping spinal cords out. It’s great!"

Perhaps you’re thinking that these remarks sound like over-enthusiastic pre-release publicity, and I agree. But now take Eli Roth, the maker of the recent flop "Hostel: Part II." His delight with gory movie-making is breathtaking. He told Interview magazine that, "Everybody says that I'm different on the days we're shooting the gore – that I'm just extra happy. I try to have that same excitement and enthusiasm for every scene, but when we're doing some really disgusting scene I'll catch myself gleefully jumping up and down at the monitor. I'm so happy I could cry."

And then he said something even more remarkable: "We're in a really violent wave, and I hope it never ends. Hopefully we'll get to the point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies."

On the bright side, I think this "really violent wave" signals the end of the nation's momentary "big puritanical mode" the makers of Basic Instinct 2 used to excuse their poorly-conceived, poorly-written and poorly-acted sequel from achieving box office nirvana.

(As to why Hollywood is having to resort to tactics that would have made William Castle and Ed Wood--not to mention most carnival barkers--blush to sell tickets, click here.)