Torture... to watch.

Rating: 3/10 (23 September 2008)

A key thing in setting up horror is making sure that we as an audience care for the characters and are thus frightened and/or disturbed when they are killed off. "Hostel" simply presents killing and torture for the sake of killing and torture. The characters are drug and sex seeking college students with lackluster character development and very graphic and disturbing death scenes. This film is practically snuff legalized - "gorno" (as I've heard it called) - or whatever you wish it to be called, but the point is, it is sick. It is a lazy, sadistic, bloody mess that desperately tries to be scary but is mainly just repulsive. It has all the things that slasher fans would want - sex and nudity and graphic killings - but absolutely nothing to put them together in the form of a solid story. The string of events is just a thin string that leads the audience along and not really caring where it ends up, just as long as the need to show sex scenes before showing lots of gore scenes is fulfilled.
The scenes of torture are admittedly well-done movie splatter, and if their aim is to disturb, then they do their job very well. However, in the age of the art of special effects, the art of story telling (which used to be the primary driving force for films) is taking a backseat. Or rather it is being intentionally put into the backseat by filmmakers who only want to get cheap material sensations out of their viewers. Any fan of horror can name many films in the genre that have considerably less gore, but are so much better due to them having a storyline that is worth paying attention to. "Hostel" is just splatter and gratuitousness in one package. What is even worse is that the slasher sub-genre is essentially the simplest form of horror (killer, victims, blood, scares), but this is even worse than that, since they intentionally spoiled the most critical element. --- 3/10
BsCDb Classification: 18+ --- brutality, violence/gore