Yet another average American horror movie

Rating: 4/10 (26 March 2006)

As a horror fan it's getting really disheartening. Why is it that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find modern films that fit the bill of "decent effective horror"?? We all know it does exist as there have been the odd recent examples, but we're still having to rely all too frequently on the output from the Asian film industries to find something remotely effective.
Then I heard about Hostel. From everything I'd heard it seemed like this might actually get back to some of the raw darker roots of the horror genre  and for once this wasn't just a remake of a great 70's/80's exploitation flick. I never liked Cabin Fever, which although having potential, never actually delivered anything, but putting that aside, the impression I've got from reading interviews with Eli Roth is that he's actually interested in going back to those exploitation roots and pushing the boundaries again.
So what the hell happened?? There's an interesting premise (that's interesting in the context of a horror film), the dark, grim almost nihilistic feel that suggests something really shocking is going to happen, yet very little actually does. In fact, I was actually quite surprised by how little... The first half of the film was pretty bad and extremely cheesy, and sets out to show as many naked women as possible (which, intentionally or not, I found to be an mildly humorous homage to 80's slasher movies, despite it showing a lack of actual creativity), but also worked effectively in making 2 of the 3 main characters pretty unlikeable. As you know something shocking is going to happen later on, you can half accept these bad scenes. At least that was what I thought The latter half of the film just completely missed the mark on being any sort of decent horror movie. The torture scenes were generally quite restrained and, unless you're new to the genre, pretty much veered away from anything particularly shocking, (the one exception being the scene with the Japanese girl). There were no scares and the one or 2 "suspenseful" scenes were lacking any actual suspense. The opportunity to shock should've been the saving grace of the film, as that's how it had been billed, but when this restraint is put alongside the bad first half, I was left wondering why I was wasting my time. The ending of the film turns out to be so contrived it's practically the most painful thing to watch. Despite all this though, the filmmakers did have 1 clever idea  the Takashi Miike cameo.
As this wasn't a tense or scary horror movie, it needed to shock and repulse the audience to get a reaction. That didn't happen. Yet again (this is becoming the ultimate cliché of the genre) the potential was there to make something really effective, but that was squandered and the film ends up as just another average American horror movie with little going for it. Although Eli Roth is clearly a horror movie fan, it seems he doesn't actually make his films for fans of horror movies.