Don't waste your money.

Rating: 2/10 (16 April 2006)

Even though I'm not a fan of mindless explicit violence, I can enjoy movies where it happens for a reason; hell, Reservoir Dogs is one of my favourite movies ever, Braindead had me crying for laughing so hard, etc.
None of those is particularly explicit and/or violent, I know, but neither is Hostel, after all.
My point is this: the few minutes in Hostel where we actually get to see some gore have absolutely no point at all, and before someone shouts "That's the beauty of it!", let me say that it wasn't supposed to be that way. Eli Roth tries hard (maybe the whole first half of the movie) to introduce us a story behind the massacre that we know is bound to happen, to give us context, and he fails miserably at that. The characters are so moronic in anything they say or do as to almost look like a caricature of your average Dumb American travelling through an Europe where everyone speaks German; the "plot" is so vain and empty that it looks as if it was written by a six year old, with all the never-ending clichés and the recurrent phrases and events from the past which come back to hunt you; the way those "ghosts" from the past make their way into the story, which is as subtle as a chainsaw; the camera work which is average at best; the lousy soundtrack that never gets to be even remotely convincing; and many more.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Roth felt the need to stick a comic relief into every other scene during that "introduction." I swear there were chuckles - hell, downright, full out laughs - in the theatre when we were told that the word the characters have been using to refer to chicks the whole time actually means "clit" in Icelandic. I'm betting the people who laughed were also enjoying great lines like "I'm the king of the swing" and "Of course, my horse."
And then we get to the slaughterhouse, where, hopefully, every teenager who has ever been bullied can let his anger out, just sit back and watch some old-school madness, right? Wrong. You get to see blood, yes, but not as much as the trailer had you hoping for, and always with some lame dialogue in between; for instance:
Josh: You... Why? The Dutch Businessman: I always wanted to be a surgeon. But the boards would not pass me. Can you guess why? You see? So I went into business. But business is so boring. You buy things you sell them, you make money you spend money. What kind of life is that? A surgeon, he holds the very essence of life in his hands - your life. He touches it. He has a relationship with it. He is part of it. Josh: Please just let me go, please... The Dutch Businessman: You want to go? Is that what you want?
So, you see, the Dutch Businessman has "problems". He has a "past." Here I was thinking that he was just your everyday Business Joe who loves his daughter and likes to slash ankles and legs open. Go figure.
I can't for the life of me think of a decent excuse for Tarantino to be associating his name with Hostel: everything Tarantino is good at, Hostel almost magically ruins. Dialogue, editing, soundtracks, even mindless pointless violence. Everything. Here's hoping we never see a Five Rooms with Roth directing (or worse, writing!) one of them.
Alas, this movie is so nauseatingly bad that Eli Roth may just turn into a cult hero. Fortunately, I saw Annie Hall for the first time the day after I watched this dumb and pointless excuse for a movie, and it almost healed all the wounds Hostel had caused. It only took Hostel a year to be released theatrically since Roth started writing it. Now I know why.