Nothing new, but still fresh

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2007)

After have seen Eli Roth's impressing 'Cabin Fever', my expectations on 'Hostel' was some what through the roof, and yeah, luckily I can't say that I was disappointed once I saw it. I remember that, when I bought it on DVD, the girl at the register, looking at the cover, said something like "Oooh, this looks disgusting". And I said "Yeah, that's kind of the point".
But I must confess that the movie was not quite what I expected. In a good way! As a fact, I thought it was going to be much more stupid. That Roth would have let himself go after the success of 'Cabin Fever'. But despite its simplicity 'Hostel' is really a pretty complex story. Ofcaurse, the idea of teenagers getting sliced and diced is not new, it's what's happening between the torn off limbs and splattered guts that's interesting, fresh and disturbing.
The story, anyway, is about two Americans backpacking through Europe that wind up in a quiet Slovakian town, after hearing of all the "easy" girls residing at the local hostel. When their Icelandic friend then suddenly disappears, they start wondering what is really going on behind the polished facade. And after that, things get really ugly.
Now, what I thought was great about 'Hostel' was not only how raw and uncompromising it was (some scenes brought out thoughts like "How can a studio release this?"). It is absolutely gut twisting in its presentations of all different ways of hurting, and killing people, but then again, not all are of a physical nature, and that is what I'm getting at. It is the very concept of the story that is more terrifying than the actual display of blood, gore and violence (hey, it's just a movie, after all). The idea of an enterprise making money on putting unaware tourists at the disposal of bored business-men, detached with their animal selves - that the movie's villains are not the usual psycho killers, but very ordinary people - is far more chilling than fake blood.
Yet 'Hostel' is not entirely a story of evil. To me it's more a portrait of the backside of modern society, where people are too busy making money, love, lies, work, plans and so on. As the movie's antagonist, the Dutch business-man, puts it while eating his lunch with his hands: "I think that we have lost our relationship to food". We are no longer in touch with the primal being living inside us, and that can sometimes be a stressing thing.
And I think that maybe, that is also part of the reason why we love horror movies.