Mediocre blood & guts horror film as a treatise on nihilistic amorality

Rating: 5/10 (29 October 2006)

(Minor spoiler ahead, but nothing crucial)
I consider myself a jaded horror movie fan who is seldomly surprised anymore. It is my contention that the atmosphere and tight editing make an intensive visceral horror experience. That fact is pretty much non-existent nowadays with the insipidly self-important & almost maladjusted "Splat Pack" relying on the pure spectacle of blood and guts to inspire revulsion and absolute disgust rather than go the route of psychological horror that actually inspire fear and terror.
Hostel almost made the cut (pardon the expression), but it did not impress me that much. The first one-third of the movie is a borderline sex comedy with gratuitous nudity which irritates me a bit. After that it went into the horror show that feels almost as authentic but even after the creepy & grimly lit atmosphere is established it nonetheless fails to scare the bejesus out of me as Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween (the originals) did. Over-reliance on gallons of blood and guts is overreacting in vain attempt to inspire genuine terror, but I make one exception which I will explain in detail.
For the record, I saw Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension at Sundance Film Festival in 2004 and it was so over the top in pointless gorefest and outrageously idiotic plot twist that I ended up loathing the movie. I dismiss Alexandre Aja as a hack French filmmaker who can't write good sh*t.
On the contrary, Eli Roth did a fairly good job establishing the atmosphere that is borderline creepy with vile evil with the introduction of the fresh concept based on, with a sad note, true events. Somewhere on Earth there exist evil that some conscience-less people indulge in perpetrating inhumane acts against the innocent human beings.
We know the historical facts on the atrocious likes of the CIA, Israel-Mossad, Spanish conquest of the Americas, Torquemada-Inquisition, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin Dada, Saddam Hussein, pre-Revolutionary Iran SAVAK and WWII-era Japanese Imperial military that utilize torture, rape & murder to the extreme. Only that such people actually pay the lucrative price for the opportunity to commit torture and murder of innocent human victims.
If that is true, it is a commentary on the inhumanity of humankind that under the circumstance of absent conscience (psychological & mental) and law even the meek & timid would be given the freedom to do what one wish would do to another human victim, perhaps in revenge for the perpetrator's personal failures in life attributed to societal and academic rejection. Or just partake in the endorphin rush of killing a victim to feel the surge of pleasure in the organic function of the perpetrator's brain (theoretically this is common with serial killers who keep doing it for the rush).
Hostel serves as the exposition of this evil that the audience have not been aware of, and here belies the real horror that even the thought of someone paying the underground business to become personally involved in the pleasure of indulging the grisly homicide of a wrongfully imprisoned victim without interference is revolting to the nth degree.
Yet this underground criminality seems like a no-brainer to make the ill-gotten profits arising from utter amorality on the dual side of business runners who abduct to imprison and clients who can afford the price of executing victims for the fun of it, just as the post-WWII United States foreign policy dictates profit and power above liberty and respect for human life, especially the current situation in the Middle East and Central Asia. Nothing is sacred and out of bounds, it seems, especially when it comes to maiming and killing 'average' humans for convenience and profiteering sanctioned and afforded by the Elite.
The infamous French novelist, playwright & philosopher of Nihilism the Marquis de Sade had it right in perspective when he wrote on the natural impulse of barbaric cruelty to satisfy the inherently maladjusted human psychology free of the confines of law and conduct: "Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries." So that concludes my mini-thesis on the film's main point.
Besides the point laid out above, the film isn't scary in the remotest. I am very jaded and was not pleased with the film's nauseating wave of gory violence and non-stop F-bombs that dilutes the tension of 'living the horror of the dingy dungeon' imagined from the terrified victim's perspective. I liked the revenge exacted in the end, because it justifies doing inhumane act to truly inhumane monsters who walk freely in broad daylight after concluding their amusements of depravity.
That's exactly what I would do to one another who is proved beyond reasonable doubt that have committed unspeakable acts and which I would do equally horrible things to in order to avenge the victim(s).
** 1/2 out of four