Top quality gore film, I liked it & bugger all the politically correct out there...

Rating: 7/10 (22 November 2007)

Hostel starts in Amsterdam where three friends, two Americans named Paxton (Jay Hernandez) & Josh (Derek Richardson) plus an Icelandic guy named Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), are backpacking looking to travel across Europe getting laid by pretty girls, to party & to smoke some drugs. At the hostel where they are staying they meet Alex (Lubomir Bukovy) who tells them of a youth hostel in Bratislava in Slovakia where there are plenty of young beautiful girls who love Americans, the next day & the three friends travel there by train. They meet two girls, Natayla (Barbara Nedelijakova) & Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova), who show them all a good time at a disco. The next morning & Oli has disappeared without leaving a message, then soon after Josh disappears leaving just Paxton to figure things out. He eventually discovers the gruesome truth...
Written, co-produced & directed by Eli Roth I wasn't sure what to expect going into Hostel, I mean I hated his previous film the horror comedy Cabin Fever (2002) & it seems to get a lot of criticism from people saying it's a pointless film filled with nudity & gore. But never let it be said I don't give a film a chance & I went into Hostel with an open mind, in the end I'm glad I spent the time watching Hostel because I have to say I really rather liked it. The script by Roth takes it's time to get going, in fact the first hour is almost total exposition with Roth setting the situation up & fleshing out the character's which makes the final 30 blood soaked minutes of carnage even more satisfying & actually have some meaning. The final third of Hostel is really intense & gory film-making with bags of tension that the films critics seem to overlook, in fact I think the PC brigade dislike & attack Hostel so much because it is so effective & is a downright decent, if admittedly brutal & gory, horror film. Some of the twists & turns are a little hard to swallow but that only serves to reinforce the fact that Hostel is pure fantasy which is also something the idiotic PC brigade conveniently seem to forget. I liked it & I'm not ashamed to admit it, I liked all the nudity & sex, I liked the drug taking, I liked the brutality, I loved the gore & all those frigid members of the PC brigade can stick that in their pipe & smoke it! Interestingly no-one is actually shown being killed on screen in the slaughterhouse torture scenes yet whenever Paxton is shown to kill someone it is seen.
Director Roth was apparently heavily influenced by executive producer Quentin Tarantino & that's no bad thing, there are some truly horrific scenes in Hostel. I loved the atmosphere as well, the scene when Josh wakes up in the room almost naked tied to a chair & he can only make out a light & two tables full of scissors, scalpels, medical equipment & knifes is very chilling & unsettling. Imagine being in Josh's position? There is some heavy duty gore but surprisingly not that much actual on screen violence, someone tries to walk with the backs of their ankles cut open, someone gets a drill poked into their body, fingers are graphically severed, legs are sliced off with chainsaws, someone commits suicide by jumping in front of a train (a really juicy sound effect as well), there are shots of someone with their chest cut open, there's loads of blood with over 150 gallons of the stuff being used to make the film, severed heads & limbs strewn about the place, someone is shot through the head, there's a couple of slashed throats & my favourite scene when a girl is seen with her eyeball hanging out of it's socket by some veins & Paxton cuts it off with a pair of scissors. The special make-up effects by KNB are top notch, very gory & very impressive.
With a supposed budget of about $4,500,000 & making over 20 million on it's opening weekend Hostel is well made with great special effects & great production values. Although not set there Hostel was filmed mostly in the Czech Republic. Apparently Hostel was written, made & released theatrically all within 12 months which is very quick. The acting is alright from an unknown cast, extreme Japanese director Takashi Miike has a small cameo as a Japanese businessman who Paxton ask's what it's like inside.
Hostel is a great film in my opinion, I liked it a lot, I liked it excessiveness & gore & gratuitous nudity. Despite a slow first half when it gets going this is a great horror flick that is pretty intense at times. It's also nice to see a horror film cause some debate, controversy & extreme opinion again. Followed by Hostel: Part II (2007).