Sad follow-up for Eli Roth

Rating: 5/10 (16 January 2006)

With so much hype surrounding this movie plus Quentin Tarantino's named tacked on, I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up too high. I did and was let down. Mind you, the special effects used during the torture scenes were exceptional. However, if you make a movie like this and bill it as a torture film with the brutal scenes then that's what it should be. I can understand the absence of character development and weightlessness of the film's plot in a movie like this because typically horror/slasher films aren't concerned with these aspects. But if you leave these elements completely out you have to compensate with excessive gore and violence. Maybe this reveals a dark side of my filmgoing expectations but the torture scenes, i.e. the horror scenes, totaled maybe 15-20 minutes of this 1.5 hour film, that's about 20% of a movie that was hyped to be incredibly graphic and disgusting. There were 1 or 2 moments where I actually did physically dry heave (pretty sure the girl sitting in front of me thought I lost it in her hair), but that was it. Honestly, I have scene more graphic horror sequences in the modern horror staples such as "Friday the 13th" and the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Halloween" series. "Cabin Fever," director Eli Roth's previous horror film is one of the most underrated horror/slasher/indie style films and more graphic and gut-wrenching than "Hostel". And I'm not sure why Tarantino is tacking his name onto projects he normally wouldn't be affiliated, but I guess he has a reason. If you're a fan of horror, I would wait until this comes out on DVD. There are some scenes that will make the average person squirm and feel their gut rolling, but the sick-to-your-stomach feeling is strongest as you walk out of the theater realizing you wasted 9 dollars on a sub-par film. If you haven't scene "Cabin Fever," go rent that and wait for "Hostel" to join the DVD library a few months from now.