Hostel Review
by Ryan Ellis (flickershows AT hotmail DOT com)January 26th, 2006
Hostel (2006)
reviewed by Ryan Ellis
January 16, 2006
'Hostel' is either way too bloody or not nearly bloody enough. Since my friend and I expected a gore-fest of epic proportions and we left the theatre muttering that that's not what we got, I'm going with Option B---not nearly bloody enough. Not that director Eli Roth is reluctant to drown his actors in thick red goop or to orchestrate some awfully depraved stuff. This is the guy who gave us 'Cabin Fever' a few years back, after all. 'Hostel' is chock full of gore. It's grisly. It's ugly. Still, if you want to impress modern horror fans with a story about murder in secret torture rooms, you have to go even further than Roth does.
Not that sliced Achilles' tendons and severed fingers and slashed throats and displaced eyeballs aren't NC-17 material. Strangely, though, with all the sex and nudity and violence and death, the movie is only rated R. Kudos to Roth, actually, for taking full advantage of the restricted rating and giving us lots of yummy T&A before getting to the grim ultra-violence. Can I get a yeehaw for rampant boobage? At least the whiny hedonists at the heart of this story (Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, and Eythor Gudjonsson) get to enjoy themselves with some gorgeous young ladies before they're kidnapped and set up for some gruesome experiences.
'Hostel' opens with Paxton (Hernandez, the young star of 'Crazy/Beautiful'...and the only actor most people will recognize), Josh (Richardson, who played young Harry in 'Dumb And Dumberer', so it's safe to say that only 12 or 13 people will recognize HIS face) and their new Icelandic friend Oli (rookie actor Gudjonsson) backpacking through Europe. They bunk out in local hostels, scarf lots of drugs & alcohol, and try their best to score some booty. [One undeveloped thread shows Richardson pondering a serious suggestion that he might be gay, then the idea is dropped like it never existed.] These metrosexual young goofs are having a good time as things are, but a mysterious stranger tells them it can get so much better. He's got the inside scoop about a town in Slovakia where the women are knockouts and they can't say no.
Since these guys don't know that youthful indiscretions will get you killed in horror movies (especially when you find yourself in remote locations), they take the bait and head for the fateful town of Bratislava. During the trek, they meet a weirdo Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasak) who will figure prominently in their future. After learning they'll have to share a room at the hostel in Bratislava with other people, the trio turns grumpy. However, their frowns turn upside down and they grow pup tents in their pants when they see the lovely treats who'll be rooming with them.
These beautiful Black Widows are played by newcomers, Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova. It should seem fishy to Paxton and Josh that these goddesses are so willing to have sex with them. However, I wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth either...which might be the point of the movie. Men will risk anything if there's a chance they'll get to have sex. Anyway, the next day, Oli disappears. Soon after, Josh vanishes. Paxton becomes determined to find out what happened to his friends. You should be able to guess where this is heading and basically how it's going to get there. Casual sex in horror movies means death. [The religious right would be hypocritical not to throw their considerable weight behind stories with this kind of subtext, actually.]
That's why my amigo and I felt like we were gypped. There are dozens of ways you can torture somebody without turning it into a snuff film, but Roth (who also wrote and co-produced) doesn't draw out the death scenes as well as he could have. The characters aren't forced to REALLY suffer. Yes, we get glimpses of the sick shit that some of the torturers are doing and our main characters are definitely put through the ringer when they get their own turn in the hot seat. But considering that wealthy men have paid thousands of dollars to brutally torture and kill these innocents, why do they get it over with so quickly? Wait. Make the kid think about it. THAT'S how you make someone suffer.
That makes for some interesting subtext, by the way. American boys head to foreign lands and get killed over there. This idea of "murder vacations"---apparently, it's based in reality---is a great idea for a movie. People kill other people every day for all sorts of reasons. Why not do it for fun too? Maybe 'Hostel' would have been more effective if the focus was on the men who are willing to fork over several grand to drill holes in anonymous screaming youngsters, rather than on the victims themselves. Haven't we've seen the dead teenager plot about 9142 times now, which is about 9000 times too many?
You may have heard that Quentin Tarantino has an executive producer credit, so you might be thinking his fingerprints are all over this movie. Nope. Apart from a few throwaway shots of 'Pulp Fiction' playing on TV screens, QT didn't seem to have much influence on Eli Roth. The least the movie-obsessed Tarantino could have done was recommend to his young protégé to watch equal doses of Dario Argento and Alfred Hitchcock...and then pick one. Bathe the screen in blood and fill us with dread (like Argento) or tease us and suggest more than you're actually showing (like Hitchcock).
Roth owes debts to the original 'Texas Chain Saw Massacre', the "Is it safe?" scene from 'Marathon Man', and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal...not to mention 'Saw' (which set a new standard for the modern gore-fest genre). If only 'Hostel' were as gripping and eerie as 'Chain Saw', as horrifying as Abu Ghraib, or even as memorable as 'Saw'. Like just about every horror movie made in the past 25 years, 'Hostel' is not very scary and it's not likely to hit you where you live. It's just not as gory or as sickening as the subject matter demands. And that makes me just about the only reviewer who will complain that 'Hostel' is too tame.
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
