waste of time and effort

Rating: 1/10 (11 October 2006)

I have to say the ads for the movie were what peaked my interest at first. Then hearing a bit about the plot whetted my interest more (sort of a combination of "The Most Dangerous Game" and "Salo"). I wasn't a big fan of Roth's earlier work, Cabin Fever, but do like Tarantino's work for the most part. Long story short, I finally got to see the unrated version of Hostel and have to say it angered me more for the amount of money, time, and hype this piece of dreck generated. Some of the other posters on this site have said similar as far as the characters themselves -- where the basic backbone to any horror movie/victim is you have to LIKE (or at least tolerate) the intended victim in order for there to be any sort of suspense/horror/fear. But give us three totally unlikable, self-centered, hedonistic, spoiled, ***holes and who really cares what happens to them? The only thing I could think of was, could we please just kill these jerks now and move on to something else? When the "nice guy" character (nice guy insofar as he isn't quite a big a pustule as his two buds) disappears and then is shown tied up and being tortured in the "club", I felt no fear, suspense, joy, elation, nothing -- only the feeling that he really did, in some way, deserve this and worse. Same for the other two nimrods. This plot idea truly had some potential but really got wasted in the soft-porn, drugs, gaybashing, racist remarks (jokes???), stereotyping.