There's always an American hero!

Rating: 6/10 (17 April 2006)

The idea I had about Hostel (from what I had heard and from all the marketing that was made around the film) was that it would be an extremely gore movie, one of those we just watch blood flowing everywhere and mutilated bodies on the floor. Ah! I also heard it had lots of sex (some people even call it pornographic I wouldn't go so far!).
Well, Hostel has actually all those "nice things" (for a gore movie, of course!), but it also have three features that are not so good!
The first one is the nationalist crap, which I really didn't expect for a movie like this! The "pride of being American" thing is so deep at some moments of the movie, that I felt even sicker seeing those scenes than the gory ones!
The second, a good American movie must always have a hero A guy who does the divine justice and revenges all his dead friends It's so typical!
The third, the portrait of Slovakia! Man, if I was Slovakian I would be insulted with this film! All that is showed is filthy buildings, old cars, abandoned kids on the street (in one word: misery!) and free sex! I know Slovakia isn't a rich country, that's for sure! It's a new democracy and they are reforming many important issues of their society, but I think the portrait done in this movie is the typical description of "the civilized guy who's coming from an occidental industrialized country". He's there (in the eastern country) just to search beautiful women and have some cheap sex!... It's so typical too! It would be a fantastic tourism advertisement: "Slovakia, land of misery, wild sex and butchery!"
But there was one detail I really appreciated in Hostel, in spite of being truly sick! It was something that I had never seen before: when the "hero guy" was escaping from the cell where he was arrested he gets into a room that seemed more like a bath-house and, suddenly, enters a guy who asks him if it was goodif he did it slowly or fast if he liked to kill his victim! Then he realized he was in a kind of a "Butcher's Club"! Those guys were paying to calmly torture and kill their victims, as they were going to a gym to do some relaxing exercises It's so sick, weird and cruel that I wouldn't even imagine that someone could create a thing like that! Sick, sick, sick!
Globally I think Hostel is fine, but it could have been much better if the three "issues" I mentioned before didn't exist. I would give it 7 out of 10, but,because of those reasons, it will be just 6 out of 10.