Girls Gone Wild Meets Texas Chainsaw

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2006)

Eli Roth is obviously a huge fan of the genre. This was made clearly evident with his first feature - the fun, ghoulish, but ultimately flawed Cabin Fever. Hostel is likewise a fun, ghoulish, but lacking movie that is better than Cabin Fever, but missing something. If this movie proves anything is that in time Roth has the potential to make a film on the same level as the ones that obviously influenced him - Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, Japanese horror films like Audition - but he's not quite there yet.
The first half of Hostel is Girls Gone Wild as a trio of friends beggar through Europe. The movie begins by finding the trio in Amsterdam. Need I say more? Soon, however, the movie thrusts its viewer into a nihilistic world where wealthy people pay good money to indulge their need for torture. And our three drug-addled, sex-crazed heroes are the main course.
Hostel has a lot going for it. It's fast paced. The characters are likable. The women are beautiful and barely wearing a stitch. And that's just the first half hour. The rest of the film takes place in a kind of hell of earth where limbs are amputated, fingers are chainsawed to the floor and the human body is reduced to the properties of a pin cushion. People are flayed and dissected with glee. Eyes dangle from their sockets. Ankle tendons are severed. Although the DVD boasts that its unrated, the gore level was not as stomach-churningly prodigious as I had anticipated. But still. Pretty much all bodily fluids are on display herein. The movie, despite all its bloodshed, seems to not take itself seriously. And neither did I. I'm not sure if the desired effect was to make the viewer squirm and dry heave or at times to laugh out loud at some of the more over-the-top effects. I did mostly the latter. For any horror fan, this is a must see, considering how stale the genre is it at the moment. More importantly, Hostel shows a horror filmmaker (and above all, a horror fan) improving his craft while delivering the visceral goods to those of us who eat that sticky stuff up.
Of the special features on the DVD, the only ones of note are the three behind the scenes features and the four separate commentaries featuring Roth and others, including one with exec. producers Quentin Tarantino and Scott Spiegel.