Effective Little Gross-Out

Rating: 6/10 (23 June 2006)

Eli Roth's Hostel isn't a very good film, nor is it  in its genre  all that imaginative. But it's effective, intermittently engaging and, above all, very satisfying.
Two Americans  the cocky Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and the broken-hearted Josh (Derek Richardson)  are backpacking across Europe with an Icelandic pick-up, the party-hard Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson). Stuck in Amsterdam, and bored with the influx of Americans, they meet the bug-eyed (or is that cross-eyed?) Slav Alex (Lubomir Bukovy, with the freaky presence of a young Marty Feldman). He entices them to head to Slovakia, where the women are all supermodels and will screw you just because of your foxy American accent. So off they go, soon in the clutches of babes who bed them, drug them, and sell them to an organization that allows you  with the right amount of cash  to kill another human being.
A film like Hostel lives and dies by its concept. This movie's queasy set up is a doozy. Roth takes his time getting his entertaining trio to Slovakia, and the camaraderie of men in pursuit of cheap thrills and cheaper women feels right. The scenes in the murder factory aren't as gross as the ads would have you believe  you grow immune to the shock fast, and reminisce about the more ingenious gross-outs of Saw. Yet the last thirty minutes are everything a horror movie should be: tense, funny, and insanely reliant on crazy twists of fate that are never less than satisfying to an audience.
And Hostel is a film that requires an audience: one that shouts, groans, and laughs at the sheer giddy high of more bloodshed and its attendant acts of revenge. The best revenge may come from the spike (pun intended) in travel to the countries of Eastern Europe; regardless of the carnage (and the pus and the gristle), there isn't one ounce of cellulite on its women.