Does this Hostel Have Rewards Points?

Rating: 7/10 (19 April 2006)

This time it's not an SUV breaking down in the middle of the Ozarks (or the Australian outback in a little-known place called Wolfe Creek) but the siren call of sex, drugs, and partying all night. Of course -- the premise is again, as new as the latest category romance novel you will see in your local drugstore, but stories have to come out of somewhere, and this genre only has a one-way lane with little room for variation and the knowledge that it will not produce greatness but popcorn products aimed at violence queens and eager teens.
Anyway, Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino, two guys who have a special, loving bond with violence taken to extremes, have teamed up to produce HOSTEL. No, it's not a travelogue depicting the breathless landscapes of Europe (where it's based), but more or less a straightforward template of young people getting caught in a situation where they have practically no control and in which they will have to resort to the same grotesque inhumanity in order to escape and never mind the missing bodyparts.
The set-up sequence is slow. It is a little unsettling to see a faceless man humming tunelessly as he mops a blood-soaked floor, but this short prologue is over soon enough. Not so soon as to make you wonder what has taken place in this unknown place... but that comes later. In the meantime, Eli Roth sustains a good hand in building up his story, in which the moronic playfulness of the three twenty-somethings -- Paxton, Josh, and Oli -- in quest for sex with available women is on full display. I don't think Roth was looking for sympathy from the audience as much as just showing, in his own way, the mentality of "boys who want to have fun". So anyone looking for a character to hold on to may need to look elsewhere because it's not here.
Now, there are some elements that stick out as unnecessary or at least, plot-questionable. In CABIN FEVER, there was this one boy who was insane and had a thing for karate moves. HOSTEL now supplies an entire gang of them, and they're pretty mean even though all they want is bubble gum. I don't know if this was meant to be comic relief but it stops the story dead in its tracks. Also unnecessary: the requisite anti-gay jokes, but that's probably not as relevant, even when it was a little off putting. There's also the misogynistic element in HOSTEL, which to me is all but invisible -- unless some women were offended at seeing so much female nudity and decided that women were being shown as bait -- which they are, and later we learn, quite willing to be so.
HOSTEL is an okay film -- good, but not particularly memorable for me. It continues to help the genre survive now that the haunted house and monster movie are all but rotting cadavers. It's much more disturbing to me to see the evil within Man, and one of the most nightmarish sequences involve the man we hear at the start of the movie: the German surgeon, who seems to be in a sort of ecstatic frenzy as he gets ready to torment Paxton (Jay Hernandez). It was reminiscent of Dennis Hopper's extreme moment of sadism in BLUE VELVET, and that scene has more homoeroticism than the lame scene between the Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasak) and Josh (Derek Richardson). There is also a cute in-joke with director Takashi Miike as a customer: the man who brought ODISHON, a classic of this genre, it made me wonder what his character might have been up to within the torture chamber that he felt he needed to tell Hernandez to be careful or he might spend all his money in there. Considering the fee these "clients" pay for their extreme entertainment, that would have been an interesting movie in its own right.