The Complaints Are Baseless or Misguided

Rating: 10/10 (31 October 2006)

As you can see by my title, I ran across quite a lot of complaints about this movie before I watched it. "It had a bad plot," people said. "It was porn for the first 40 minutes, and its transition into gore was really sudden." "The acting was bad," "the directing was terrible", "the story sucked", etc., etc.
When I watched it I was very pleasantly surprised to find that all these complaints were wrong. Sure, some of them were based on truths, but I think people distorted them simply because they didn't like the premise. Yes, the first 20-30 (NOT 40) minutes of the film had quite a lot of nudity in it, but it was by no means porn! And though I'm not a great fan of mindless sex, at least it wasn't pointless. The sex is what lured the main characters into the hostel in the first place. And the transition into the gore was not sudden, but quite easily handled--in fact, I'm surprised at the wonderful job that Eli Roth did at transforming the mood from light and flippant into dark and unfathomably disturbing.
The acting was by no means bad. Jay Hernandez, I believe, did a spectacular job as Paxton. It is fascinating to watch Paxton's character change from a carefree college student obsessed with sex and girls to a troubled man that delights in vengeance against his torturers. The other actors did their job well (though Derek Richardson as Josh, while mostly skillful, needed to work on his whimpering).
Now for the story. As you all should know, it's about three college-age men that backpack across Europe looking for sex, and they're recommended to a hostel, which turns out to be a place that people get tortured (seriously, the plot is better than I made it sound). Eli Roth didn't add many fancy or unexpected twists into his screenplay; you won't see the kind of surprise endings that the Saw franchise is famous for. But everything Eli Roth does have in here he made sense of. He uses very little unnecessary material, and he does a great job at subtle foreshadowing so that, in the end, everything makes sense. Please pay attention to the scene where Paxton tells Josh about a childhood memory of watching a girl die, because it foreshadows what would have otherwise been a really dumb (er, I mean Gryffindorish) moment in the script.
I also loved the fact that Eli Roth and the sound editors didn't splurge on the screams. In fact, when the screams get particularly loud, the editors actually turned them down and instead increased the other noises (such as the chainsaws or, most memorably, the snapping of sharp scissors). You can't know just how pleased I was that they didn't blast me from my seat with 100,000 decibels of pure sound.
I also loved the score, which moved away from the overly-creepy style of horror films and more towards the dramatic form. It suited the film better, because this film was really not scary. However, it was truly disturbing and horrific (hence the term "horror film"). It is dumbfounding to witness this appalling display of human brutality and its marked effect on the characters (namely Paxton--he has an absolutely haunting terror in his eyes during the last half-hour of the movie). This brutality is made all the more effective by Roth's refusal to use the safer, less inciting "cut-to-black" techniques found in cheap horror films. No, he shows us everything. In great, bloody detail. And it is gross.
The trailer said the movie was based off true events. I'm guessing it probably meant the premise as opposed to the actual characters, but either way it's entirely believable. Humans are cruel creatures, and they go to insane lengths to continue in their destructive depravity. It was Roth's effectiveness in conveying this theme that made me give this movie a 9 instead of an 8.
This movie is a must-see for horror fans, or for MATURE viewers. If you cannot see past the gore, you should probably not watch this movie. If you can, however, you need to watch this at least once (more, if you can stomach it), despite the side effects of a churned stomach and a severe jolting of the emotions and senses.