good idea, shame about the movie

Rating: 6/10 (17 April 2006)

I had high expectations for this movie. The idea sounded good: three backpackers get kidnapped and are tortured and killed for the pleasure of bored rich people. That alone, is scary to me.
But instead, the film is a let down. Yes, it is gory, very gory in places, but by no means as horrible as the hype led me to believe. Eli Roth makes one terrible, crucial mistake - he doesn't develop his characters. We spend the first half of the film following these three guys as they take drugs, have sex with whores, and just generally behave bad. By the time the torture came about, i couldn't have cared less if they lived or died. If Roth had spent that time building the characters up and making us care, then this would have been a far superior film.
The torture scenes are a disappointment too. This sounds perverse, but we spend half the film getting to this point, and the torture is very limited. Yes, bad things happen to them, but I was expecting far more graphic scenes of violence. I would have liked this film to really explore the dark side of humanity. I mean, what does drive someone to torture someone for fun? Unfortunately this is denied us.
Plus, it is totally unrealistic. In particular, one of the characters gets part of his hand chopped off by a chainsaw. This guy should have bled to death within minutes, but he doesn't. I can suspend my disbelief in films, but this was too silly even for me.
In short, Hostel fails to be the nerve racking horror film we were led to expect. Yes, there are some disturbing scenes (the eyeball scene, for example) and if you're a fan of gore, yes it doesn't totally disappoint. But i feel this had so much potential and it was wasted. It could have ranked up there with Silence Of The Lambs, or even Seven, but instead it went to a writer/director who has no idea of how to create characters. This film deserved to be good, it deserved to go to a better person.
Watchable, but no where near as good as it should have been.