great special effects - but not thrilling enough for a good horror movie

Rating: 4/10 (13 May 2006)

I watched this movie lat Friday at a smaller cinema with a - lets call it suboptimal (means decent) - screen. With about 20 other persons in the whole cinema (Hostel started here just 2 1/2 weeks ago!)
story / plot: there is basically none ;-). But hey: it's a horror flick! What do you expect ?! It is as good as other so called stories of that kinda movies. In one sentence: 3 guys (2 from USA) backpack through Europe, get in some trouble (not real trouble) in Amsterdam (Netherlands), hear from Saviour that in a Slovenian city all girls are horny top models *gg*, step in the trap and get slashed by peeps that pay for it.
camera: solid, but nothing special - I expected more of that.
thrill: to me - none. There are no scary moments. But one person left the movie right after the first violent scene. Maybe she should have been watching Cold Back Mountain or so.
blood / gore: much in the second part of the movie. Explicitly shown. Some people might not feel well after that, but it all feels a little misplaced to me. There was nothing really shocking about that, because the whole thrill was missing. The Japanese woman that left the eye is jumping around the next scene like nothing happened - wtf was that ?
Sex: Sex and horror ? There has always been kinda relation, but this movie carries sex to extremes ... during the first half of the movie I sometimes thought I am watching kinda cheep (soft-) sex flick and not a horror movie... nothing stimulating even if the main female characters are kinda hot (I have to admit). Especially the sauna-scene. That was so cheep I cought myself rolling eyes red-handed and grunted 'oh no'.
Entertainment: the movie was kinda entertaining. Otherwise the movie would not pass that quick. But I think it depends on expectance of something big to happen - but it didn't. Don't get me wrong. The movie had some special moments that were quite cool and scenes that where kinda entertaining.
I gave 4/10 because of realistic (I think - how should I ?!) illustration of violence and a real hot female character (otherwise it might have been 3 points, but who knows?). But somehow the movie made time pass fast, maybe because of unfulfilled expectations. Who knows.