Amazing - a US horror that's actually good!

Rating: 7/10 (25 March 2006)

Hostel is that rare thing these days - an American horror movie that actually delivers. Whereas most current Hollywood "horrors" are anaemic affairs that sacrifice scares for laughs and tend to have their characters sneer instead of scream, Hostel goes for the jugular with some genuinely harrowing moments (you'll never see toenail clippings in the same way again). Eli Roth seems to have taken a tip from the 1970s, the golden age of horror, by placing his protagonists in unfamiliar surroundings, stripping them of all comforts and subjecting them to such horrendous ordeals that, to paraphrase Tobe Hooper, the audience really doesn't know 'who will survive and what will be left of them.'
Beginning innocuously enough with two fresh-faced American backpackers doing hash and whores in Holland, Roth slowly cranks up the tension by having the hapless teens encounter a guy who tells them that if they're looking for hot chicks then they just have to visit a hostel in a remote town in Slovakia. Mocking the young Americans' ignorance by casually referring to a non-existent war, and making out that the women of Eastern Europe are still living life as though they were in a Soviet state of the 1980s, pretty soon this silver-tongued creep has convinced the teens and their Icelandic buddy to take a chance. One unsettling train journey later, and the boys believe that all their wishes have come at once, as beautiful, buxom, naturist girlies frolic for them at the legendary hostel.
Of course, this is just the flypaper. Pretty quickly, the Icelander is missing, and it gradually becomes apparent that the hostel is the front for something sinister.
Crossing over into exploitation by featuring acres of female skin and full frontal scenes, Hostel fondly recalls the political incorrectness of so many 1970s British horror movies, combining this with the gutsy gore of 1980s American shockers. However, Roth ensures that this is more than just a tribute with some neat directorial touches and motifs, contrasting the light S&M fetishes in the Dutch brothels with the truly awful fate of the Slovak hostelers. He also keeps things interesting with a twist two thirds of the way through the movie.
Hostel's not a perfect film - the script lacks the anger or isolation that defines the greatest genre films. The greatest horror directors (Walker, Kubrick, Romero) seem to retain an ambivalence towards the material that Roth lacks - it feels like he enjoys this to much to be repelled by it. But this is worth more than a hundred Screams or Final Destinations because it does not try to humourise the horror, or make light of the characters' ordeals: no-one can come out of this smiling. Superior to Cabin Fever, most certainly, and pretty much on a par with recent hits such as Wolf Creek and The Descent, Hostel is the best US horror I've seen for some time. See it.