Exciting Slasher-Gore-Horror

Rating: 8/10 (9 January 2006)

Hostel is the story of two young American backpackers, Josh (Derek Richardson) and Paxton (Jay Hernandez) traveling across Europe after graduation from university. They meet a guy from Iceland, Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) and all end up in Amsterdam together searching for drugs, sex and post-adolescent "Spring Break"-type fun in Europe. The film is really well shot with some incredible visuals and backgrounds (according to Roth he filmed most of it in the Czech Republic). After meeting an Eastern-European guy in Amsterdam the trio of hungry guys head to Slovenia to find a hostel known for its beautiful Eastern-European women. What they find instead is a place where beautiful young Eastern-European women collect men and women from all over the world as playthings for international torture afficianados who pay exorbiant sums of money to have their way with their unsuspecting foreign victims. The nationality of each victim is understood to be part of the attraction, part of each torturer's desired object/fetish.
Debuted un-rated and in an un-finished format at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005, viewers felt it was one of the best horror films they had ever seen. According to viewers who saw it then, the horror-gore-torture scenes were graphic and explicit, leading most reviewers to fear for its eventual presentation after editing for wider cinematic release (thank goodness for DVDs, everyone suggests that then at least viewers will be able to see the deleted scenes). The released film is still extremely graphic and filled with marvelous scenes of explicit gore and horror (for those who like such stuff). Anyone who enjoys slasher-horror-gore films will be entertained. Roth has made an enjoyable film that is well scripted, well filmed and well acted. Unlike most horror-slasher-gore flicks which spend a great deal of time focused on the traditional male on female heterosexual violence, Roth plays with this and turns it on its head. In Roth's interpretation female bodies are objectified as sexual objects while his male bodies become objects for torture, an interesting twist which heightens the horror of the film (not to overlook the superb acting by Derek Richardson).
While Roth's film plays with traditional horror films (and to a lesser degree "Spring Break/European vacation" films) at the same time his film re-inscribes morality, hetero-normativity and justice in ways that are far from innovative. The good guys are Americans. Americans when in immoral situations rise above them and make morally justifiable decisions. And bad guys are tainted with homosexuality, making their sadistic desires more repulsive because of their sexual orientations. Inevitably the "good-guy" American must punish the "bad" homosexually inclined European "other" in order to bring about a cycle of redemption that is traditional and normative. Roth's film would have been more interesting if he had not fallen back on the characterizations of "good-guy" Americans and "bad-guy" European "others" and instead played with the amorality of the world he is depicting. The subject of Roth's film is at once disturbing and riveting. It is important given the nature of our world today. According to Roth in an interview with Arrow in the Head he had come up with the idea when a friend had showed him an internet site which marketed such horrors. We live in a world where human lives have become commodified and marketed as experiences of desire. Experiences that for the right price can be purchased and consumed. The world Roth portrays whether "real" or not draws attention to the fact that sexuality, desire, sadism, torture and pain have all become a part of the greater world of capitalism. We live in world where all experiences are commodified and subject to the amoral laws of the market, a subject that certainly needs to be addressed on a critical level. Beyond the slasher-gore-horror aspects of Roth's film these fundamental problems lay at the heart of his film and need to be discussed.