The horror dropping out of slavering mouths

Rating: 10/10 (6 October 2009)

"Hostel" (2005) consists of two parts. And just let me say it frankly: A first part that could not have been made in a more stupid way and almost caused me stopping the movie, and a second part which belongs to the best horror I have ever seen, and believe me, I am experienced. That the director had chosen Slowakia as a background for the second part shows anew that Eastern Europe is not just a cheap place for making a movie (with horrible wages for the indigenous stunts and no Eastern Europeans in the main roles), but delivers a scenery of Medieval castles, Kafkaesque towns and wide-spread farm-land as far the eye-sight reaches. The place where the movie was shot belong one thousand years long to Hungary until it had been taken away during the Trianon treaty in 1920. Since then, what has been called Slowakia for a few decades, has been and is degenerate, corrupt and brutal, and frankly, I would not be astonished if the horror that the movie depicts is been based on true events. On the other side, Slowakia or Upper-Hungary was also the place of the Hungarian countess Erzsebet Bathory who was one of the first known series killers. The Eastern European earth is imbued with history, every pebble tells you a story, so it is no wonder that Herzog shot his remake of Murnau's Nosferatu in the Slowakian Carpathians.
What makes the horror in "Hostel" so powerful is that it is not realistic like practically all horror movies that had been issued in the last decades, but naturalistic in the literary sense of the term. The camera stands behind the tormentors and turns so long until each angle of the gruesome scene is floodlighted and exhausted. The director, Eli Roth, does not make the mistake to try to give his naturalistic shots an aesthetic icing by heaving it off the actual scene. When you see the acts, you are really shocked, the movie achieves a hardly ever reached immediacy. Foreign businessmen travel to Slowakia simply and solely because in a decrepit factory amidst the trash that the communists left, there are kidnapped young foreign people imprisoned whom you are allowed to torture uninhibited by any moral bond if you just pay enough. You even see the pathologic lust dropping out of the slavering mouths, when the tormentors finally stand at the goal of their life-long dreams to get an orgasm from drilling out the eyes or burning through the Achilles tendons of innocent people.
"Hostel" is without doubt one of the top-horror-movies of all times.