A poor cover version

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2006)

I don't normally get too carried away with movie hype, I have been burned too many times in the past to let my inner geek run riot. When I heard about this movie for the first time on Ain't it Cool news I was trapped in a Shelob's web of anticipation. The film's premise was born out of a conversation between two gore hounds, Harry 'King of the nerds' Knowles (founder of AICN) and new kid on the block director Eli "Cabin Fever" Roth. Harry described an underground Asian website that could hook you up with an organisation who actually offer the chance to kill another human for the right price, reportedly in the £10k region. Eli went home, had a look on the net and Hostel was born.
Let me just state for the record that I'm a major gore hound, I love extreme cinema, I love being scared, and I love provocative and stimulating films. I love to be challenged on an emotional and intellectual level. So when names like Fukasaku Kinji and Takashi Miike are being dropped into the mix as apparent influences for this work, I was positively moist with anticipation. Battle Royale and Audition after all are two of my favourite extreme masterpieces. Bring it on! OK, so the premise, three backpackers are on a hedonistic spree across Europe, seeking sex, drugs and rock n roll. While in Amsterdam they hear of a Slovakian hostel that promises to be a utopia of indulgence, so off they head for paradise. Naturally they are soon knee deep in Slovakian honey and all promises appear fulfilled. Not quite. They have been ensnared by a trafficking ring specialising in human hunting for those too rich to know better, and are systematically subjected to all manner of torture, pain and eventually a grisly death. You'd think I'd be pleased then? Well, not really. Firstly, after about five minutes I absolutely hated all three obnoxious annoying main characters so much that I wanted to take a ball hammer to their tootsies myself. And that's basically the critical flaw with this film. You see, the most devastating and affecting films of this genre are set up to perfection. They give you characters to identify with, they try to build some sort of relationship or bond with the audience, so that when the darkness descends, you are there with them, sharing their fear, feeling their pain. The cheese wire sequence in Audition is only so powerful because we have spent an hour getting to know this guy and can relate to his loneliness and longing to find a partner. So when he suffers some extreme acupuncture, ouch, we are right there with him. That's the real power of this genre, we need to feel in control of our universe, but these film makers show us the real illusion that is existence, they expose our mortality, our vulnerability and complete lack of control over the random madness that this life is. And that's the real scary thing!! Not the blood and entrails.
So when two annoying American students and a baffling Icelander get power drilled in Slovakia, it is hard to care about their fate, perhaps the world is better off, we lost three idiots, the world just got lighter! Yes of course I understand all the thematic inversions taking place on screen, the hunter becoming the hunted, the objectification being turned around on our protagonists, the Pinocchio parable, blah blah blah. Again, I hated the morons, so all else really is irrelevant. Without engaging characters, the plot falls on its fat derrière and we are left with mindless meaningless gore, titillation and overriding apathy. Could have been a contender, but instead plays like a poor American cover version of an Asian masterpiece.