A bit of a disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (1 October 2007)

Having had it on good authority that Hostel was worth watching and having seen and quite liked Cabin Fever, I decided to stay up til 3AM to watch "Hostel"...
Admittedly it isn't particularly awful. All in all it is well acted, there are some interesting torture scenes and whatnot. Bearing the target audience in mind, there is plenty of graphic violence, hot, naked girls and moronic, drunken antics. To all intents and purposes "Hostel" should have been a winner.
It's just that there's no real point to it.
The way I see it, it should have gone either one of two ways - a blacker than black comedy, or a truly horrifying trip of sickening, wind-warped mutilation and torture. What we actually have is somewhere in the middle. A bit like "Eurotrip" with chainsaws.
Some of the scenes, mainly due to the reactions of the people involved, are pretty harrowing, but then when fingers start going missing and eyeballs popping out it all starts to become cheesy and almost parodic of the "Evil Dead" and such like. There's nothing implied - it's all there for you to see. Nothing is left to your imagination.
The idea that such a place as is featured in "Hostel" could exist is terrifying. In the same way that, because of "Deliverance", the number of good ol' boys going for a canoe vacation down Georgian rivers has been in steep decline since the late 70's, so could "Hostel" have made backpackers the world over want to stay the hell away from Bratislava. "Hostel" could have been a truly scary film, which I would have liked. It isn't.
All in all, Hostel is no better than your average horror flick. Neither is it original. I'd recommend "Severance" instead.