Don't believe the hype!

Rating: 5/10 (3 May 2006)

With Hostel, Director Eli Roth set out to make the most horrifying film that he could. Pre-release announcements promised that the film would be 'wild', 'ultra violent', 'sick' and 'disturbing' and close in tone to Takeshi Miike's "Audition" or Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The wonderful marketing, including a suitably grimy website and the inclusion of industry whore Tarantino's name on publicity material, suggested that the film would be a milestone in grindhouse horror. Expectations were high, to say the least.
Sadly, Roth has failed in every way possible to achieve his goal. The result is a good example of how a great premise can be thrown away by a poorly developed script and bad direction.
The story follows three backpackers who travel to Bratislava in order to find a hostel in which the women are reputedly super hot and up for sex 24/7. The guys soon wish that they had followed their original plan to go to Barcelona when, one by one, they are abducted, taken to a charnel house and attacked by sickos who have payed for the pleasure of inflicting pain, misery and death.
A talented writer and director could have crafted a gruelling terror classic from this interesting premise, but Eli Roth is neither and he screws up from the word go. The first 45 minutes or so (roughly half the total running time) is spent following the sexploits of the three young men as they sample the delights of Amsterdamn. There is plenty of nudity, but nothing that can be classed as 'wild', 'sick' or 'disturbing'. In the next 15 minutes, we follow the annoying trio to the titular hostel, where we get more nudity (and absolutely no horror).
Finally, Roth decides he has had enough of filming tits and ass and begins the bloodletting. For a while, the film delivers on its promisesthe backpackers are abducted one by one and we get to witness some great gore courtesy of make-up maestros Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger; leg drilling, tendon slicing, chainsaw slashing and assorted bloody gunshots drench the screen with blood.
However, it is not long before the film enters the realms of idiocy again with the escape of the final backpacker. Having freed himself and made his way to a car undetected (it even has the key in the ignition!), our plucky survivor turns back to rescue someone he hardly knowsa Japanese girl he met the day before, who is already being worked over by a maniac with a blowtorch. From this point onwards, any semblance of logic and plausibility goes out the window and the audience is treated to a trio of classic unintentionally-funny moments: the three-in-one hit-and-run, the street children attacking the bad guys in exchange for bubblegum and the 'tragic' suicide by speeding train.
With Eli Roth citing 'The Vanishing', 'Sympathy for Mr Vengeance', 'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer', and 'The Wicker Man' as influences, one does wonder what the hell he was thinking whilst making Hostel, a film that has absolutely nothing in common with these masterpieces. Hostel is entertaining in a hokey waytits, ass, guts and blood are classic schlock horror elements and all score points with mebut it is far from the gruelling and relentless shocker that Roth had promised to deliver.