Failure in All Apects.

Rating: 1/10 (5 May 2006)

After viewing Hostel it was clear that the film serves only two purposes: to act as a template for how a film should never, ever ever be made, and as a confirmation that Cabin Fever was not just a fluke, Eli Roth is indeed THAT bad of a writer and THAT bad of a director. For a man who uses the words "Bad" and "Ghettoized" to describe the condition of the horror genre today, Roth seems to be doing overtime to make sure it stays that way.
Hostel follows two American backpackers (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) and their drifter friend, as they waste the first hour of the film, which is only 1:35, stumbling across Europe doing drugs, trying to get laid, cracking jokes your little brother would think were funny and more or else making it impossible for us as an audience to care anything for them as characters. After the "plot" decides to get moving we see that the travelers of Slovakia are starting to go missing, and we find out that the girls our American protagonists have been busy ogling over are in fact dealers of sorts to sadistic businessmen. And wouldn't you know it, they happen to pay top dollar for American subjects.
Hostel makes me wonder what Eli Roth is really trying to accomplish. There is not a single moments worth of innovation in the films entirety. Is Roth trying to become synonymous with awfulness? Is he trying to give Uwe Boll a fight for the worst director in cinema history? If you take each aspect of Hostel and compare it to the worst movie you can think of, I'm almost certain you will find Hostel is just as bad, if not worse.
First, the acting. This is the only true horrifying part of the film. You may not end up seeing the whole film if you're anything like me, because I spent most of its duration hanging my head in pure disbelief that any director would send his actors to the silver screen in such disgrace. Hernandez, who may not be an A-List actor but surely not a bad one, is sent to a sadly stupefied level. It is impossible for Hostel to work as a film because of the characters. From the very first few minutes I couldn't care at all what happened to these stoners, hell, I was actually waiting to see them tortured. We are not given any developing or background information on our protagonists, especially our "hero" Hernandez. Point being, there's no point of relation between us and them and certainly no reason for us to care at all what happens to them.
And then we have the dialogue. Oh good God the dialogue. If this were a silent picture or even if the dialogue consisted of only "Fagg*t, Drugs, F*ck, Sex" then the film would have gotten itself across all the same, because there isn't a single line of important exposition in the entire barrage of triteness. That coupled with countless scenes that are entirely null and void, and you have not a single plausible aspect of Hostel. Well, I'll actually give Roth credit that the idea of Hostel itself is intriguing, but as I've stated above, he made sure we forgot about that.
As far as the torture scenes are concerned, which I can only imagine are the reason people decided to venture to the theatres to see Hostel; they are too little too late. What is hyped up to be one of the most disturbing films of our time adds up to nothing more than some quick cuts and a dangling eyeball. I must admit I was extremely let down, for I was hoping to be satisfied with at least once part of the film. The scenes were not long enough to create tension and edited so poorly that what we did end up seeing, we actually didn't really get to see.
With this being the second monumental disappointment coming from Eli Roth, it is beyond safe to say that this man is incapable of delivering the goods. On par with the horrendous efforts of Cabin Fever, I cannot recommend Hostel to anyone. It does not work as a horror piece, it does not work as an entertainment piece and it certainly does not work as anything that we should remember. Few films are less desirable than Hostel.