The second worst movie of 2006

Rating: 2/10 (9 November 2006)

Of all the movies I've seen this year, "Hostel" is second only to "Date Movie" as the worst movie of 2006. Hostel might have come in as the third worst movie had I actually went to see "Little Man", but who in their right mind would actually pay money to see that movie? . Anyways, back to Hostel. I saw Quentin Tarantino's name on it as the promoter for the film, and the ads for the movie looked slightly promising, so off to the movies I went. At least the popcorn was good...
So, first grievance: about fifteen minutes into the movie I get a general feel for the characters: I hate them and can't wait for them to get killed. I'm honestly not sure if it was intentional or not, but the characters come off as some of the most unlikable people I've ever seen in a movie. I've seen movies, plenty of movies, where I just plain did not care about the characters because they weren't developed properly or I just found them extremely uninteresting. But these characters...God, what the hell?
Second grievance: I guess this is supposedly based on true occurings, but could they have at least gone the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" route? For those of you who don't know, the actual events had almost nothing to do with the events of the movie. "Hostel" should have just used the basic premise and done something, I don't know, Interesting, with it. Instead the story is extremely run-of-the-mill. A bunch of horny stoner teens want to get laid by whores, so they make a trip to a Hostel and HEY! THEY GET LAID! But oh no! Bad things start happening, one of their buddies is missing! There's a message that he left but, hmmmm, that's strange, isn't it? Oops! He's dead! Blah blah blah, they start getting tortured and killed one by one, until only one of the unlikable characters is left alive. Bleh, the end. Not a single shred of originality is exhibited by this film, not even any neat camera tricks or anything to keep someone at least slightly entertained.
Third Grievance: When I became aware of the insanely lackluster plot and unlikable characters I also noticed something else. It seems as if, when coming up with the concept for this film, someone said "Hey! Let's just make it really gory! Then it won't matter how lame and predictable the plot is!" I like gory movies but...the gore in this movie even seem uninspired. There's no technique or anything applied to the way the gore scenes are shot to make them seem more disturbing, they're just..."hey look, a guy getting hacked up, be disturbed". It's hard to explain, but I think big horror fans should get what I mean. You have to do more than just show something happening to get an effect from it.
So yeah, my conclusion, this was definitely a turd.
P.S. Anyone who saw this movie and writes a negative review saying that it was bad because it "disturbed them" is an idiot, considering that's the ENTIRE POINT OF A HORROR MOVIE: TO HORRIFY. Even though this one didn't. I just wanted to get that off my chest, I hate when people do that.