It's not the "Hostel" that is bad, it's the movie that is bad

Rating: 1/10 (22 March 2007)

I liked an earlier comment "Bad things happen to bad people".
If you would like to understand better why Americans are not very welcome around the world (unless their capture and pending torture jacks up the price, i.e. value of them), this is a great example. Send some creepy bratty American college boys on a Europe tour. Have them cuss and swear and using the F-word in every third sentence (even when they are pleading for their very life). Have them treat anybody with disrespect and loathing, including the girls they want to have sex with. Oh, I forgot the absolutely boring fake teenage sex parties in a public youth hostel. You put all that into a movie, and the result is predictable. GIGO: garbage in = garbage out.
I wonder if anyone could show me what the point of such a movie would be? It can't have been an interest in "horror". Nothing in this movie was scary, just plain repulsive, because it was done so badly. The built-up toward the gruesome scenes is plainly annoying. These college boys are immature brats, rude and anything but likable. Who cares what happens to them?
We get a few hints of what lies ahead when they meet a strange "meat lover" in their train compartment. Whom they again meet later, in the dungeons of some eastern country, of course, where unspeakable evil things can happen.
It would have been, -maybe-, an interesting horror movie if we had learned what really motivates those rich patrons, failed / wannabe surgeons, and other American cash paying thrill seekers. But those characters are mere shells of types, shallow and totally uninteresting. We don't even get the feeling that they are really getting a "kick" out of the horrid stuff they are doing to their victims, it's all so mechanical. And that hunchbacked dungeon clean up maid, who incinerates the remains of victims... what a sorry hoot! No Hannibal Lecter ("Silence of the Lambs") here anywhere. No fear of looming danger like in "Aliens". No identification with any of the characters. Just dull disgust with a wannabe horror movie. Movie making for two reasons: gratuitous violence without a plot and box office revenues.
Do they give out awards for that?