Another horror movie that was horrific in quality alone..

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2006)

As usual in horror movies, people are really stupid. Roth's characters walked into a situation that was very obviously a set-up, and even when people started disappearing didn't get out of it. They were exceptionally gullible, even for horror movie fodder -- I mean to say characters.
The concept for the film is that three friends are backpacking across Europe, and catch wind of a hostel where exceptionally desperate but hot women will, for free, have sex with anything with a penis. One of them gets hit on by someone that reminded me of a gay Hannibal Lecter, but that's not really important yet.
The first weird situation occurs when, the morning after this fantastic night, one of the three goes missing. They get a text message from him that says "I go home". Another guest, a "Japanese" girl (generic Asian actress) notices her friend has mysteriously disappeared as well. She then receives a picture message from her friend that has both MissingAsianGirl and MissingStonerGuy in it with a caption of "We go out". Both people in the picture have exceptionally lifeless stares, but we'll ignore that.
So there're now two missing people, and what do the token American kids decide to do? Go take more drugs and get completely wasted in a place where there are most definitely people going missing. One guy is abducted and killed, another guy (in his drunken, drugged stupor) accidentally locks himself in a closet. He lives for the evening, but returns to the hostel to find that MissingAsianGirl's friend has vanished and so has his remaining American buddy. Around this time, he's mugged by children and loses his cellphone. Yep, a bunch of kids steal his cellphone from him.
The movie continues to reveal that the guy who let them know about this hostel and the women that seduced them on the first night that they arrived are actually making thousands of dollars by selling tourists to a business that allows people to kill other people. SurvivingAmericanGuy (or SAG, as I'll call him now since I can't remember his actual name) learns this as he follows an obvious trap in order to find his missing friends. After the trap is sprung, SAG is handcuffed to a chair and proceeds to beg for mercy in not one but two languages to the man who begins assaulting the helpless frat boy with scissors and a metal stick. This proceeds to have the man gag SAG, who is now much more tolerable to have in the movie.
SAG has two of his fingers cut off by chainsaw, and that somehow allows him to escape his handcuffs. His assailant slips on a pool of blood and injures himself with the chainsaw, which gives SAG the necessary time to grab a gun and kill the man. Long story short, SAG escapes and finds a change of clothes, where he meets another deranged man who unknowingly explains to him the situation. SAG almost escapes when he starts hearing random outbursts of Japanese. He decides to go back for the girl and try to help her, and ends up killing the maniac he spoke to earlier.
The face of the Japanese girl is quite possibly the most graphic scene gore-wise of the movie. The man had pried one of her eyeballs from its socket, and had used a blowtorch on her face (possibly a reference to Pulp Fiction, since Tarantino produced this work). Here's where I was confused. SAG obviously didn't understand Japanese. My elementary knowledge picked up "It hurts" and "help me", but somewhere along the lines she must have asked him to cut the dangling eye off. Or not, since she screamed like hell after he did it. Anyway, they escape in a car from the complex with another vehicle in chase.
The movie gets slightly more satisfying at this point. The guy that told them about the hostel and the two girls that seduced the friends are standing in the middle of the road closely together and don't notice the car slowly pull closer to them. SAG notices them though, and he hits them dead on. The chase car (which didn't catch up, despite how fast it was going and how slow SAG was driving before he hit them) runs over the survivors. Later, the kids that stole SAG's phone earlier in the film attempt to block his car's passage through an alleyway. Rather than running them down like he did the other people who wronged him, he bribes them with a bag of candy. A few seconds later, when the chase car comes through slows down and stops as this candy checkpoint when the kids get in their way. However, the kids proceed to bludgeon to death these men (yes, trained killers WITH guns were easily defeated by a group of not more than 10 children).
The end of the movie shows CurrentlySurvivingAsianGirl jumping in front of a train after she sees her horrific reflection in the mirror. This distraction allows SAG to catch a train that gayHannibalLecter (who happened to be the one that killed SAG's friend) happens to be on. SAG takes revenge on him at the next stop, and the movie is over. Hooray.
I really really hated this movie. It was boring as hell and attempted to placate me with topless women, which really only worked but so long. The characters fell for continually more and more obvious traps, to the point that I was sad to see that any of them survived. It attempted to shock and disgust me with images such as people being stabbed or having fingers/toes cut off, but all horror movies nowadays do that and it isn't innovative OR scary. It's kinda sickening, but most horror movie goers won't even be slightly shocked by it.
Avoid this movie like the plague. Don't go to see movies Tarantino produced if he's not writing/directing them himself.