California -- "You are so far from home"

Rating: 5/10 (20 November 2019)

I'm glad I saw this, though I had an exceedingly hard time getting through it. I succeeded because it was being shown in a horror-film class and I needed to persevere. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would have made it.
I am a horror-film fan, and a ninny who often hides my eyes. For the first time in my experience, I also tried to stop my ears. The sights and sounds in this movie combine to create a sense of being trapped that forces the viewer to experience vicarious psychological torture.
Not exactly a fun time, but there is meaning here. As in a graphic horror movie like "Cannibal Holocaust," "Hostel" should not be dismissed because of its shocking excesses.
There IS a compelling story here. Two recent college grads from America, and their older Icelandic pal, are partying in Amsterdam, when, due to their obnoxious reaction to missing curfew at their hostel, they fall into the acquaintance of an Eastern European who describes a place where the sex is free and it's like child play to score. In no time, the trio hops a train to Slovakia.
Uneasiness starts to build inexorably. These guys are rapacious exploiters, heading to Bratislava with a plan to bed local women. (Horror-movie buffs may recall the bravado of similarly cocky protagonists in "The Blair Witch Project" and the aforementioned "Holocaust.")
We're somewhat discomfited by the vulnerability of Josh (Derek Richardson). He'd declined to pay for sex in Amsterdam, and, later on the train, reacts violently to a knee tap from a weird Dutch businessman (Jan Vlasak), who eats his salad with his fingers, explaining he enjoys making "a connection with something that has died" for him. Er, OK. His creepy antics raise a red flag -- again, recall the warning sign of a guide's debilitating snake bite in "Holocaust" -- but the tourists aren't about to turn back. How many people would? Life offers its share of strangeness, but how many of us ponder the potentialities?
Sure enough, when our guys arrive at their Slovakian hostel, and follow some uninhibited local gals to a steam room, the sauna looks like every schoolboy's fantasy: "Oh, s___ man, we're never leaving here!" (A little dark humor.)
It's all a big setup. These outwardly crude, street-dumb horndogs are putty in the clutches of their handlers. Like a sinister sleight of hand, a crew of child street thugs surrounds Josh, only to be sent packing by, yep, the Dutch businessman. And soon Josh is apologetically offering this guy a drink. Bad move!
The movie drives the viewer -- at least if she is of a certain age -- to feel a sense of protectiveness over the wayfarers. Yet we are as defenseless as they. The scene in which Josh awakens from being drugged, and finds himself chained, shackled, and desperately trying to understand, induces terror and panic. We become Josh -- how compelling is THAT for direction?
I felt weak and defeated as I tried to get through this film. At a certain point, I reached for some life-giving, life-affirming sustenance, and ate some grapes. I thought of my loved ones and my wish for their safety. I uncomfortably remembered how we humans seem programmed to see so very little of what is actually present.
"I get a lot of money for you," Paxton's erstwhile sex partner gloats. "And that makes YOU my b___." One shivers here to remember a similar dynamic in the French-Dutch film "The Vanishing," in which a man is lured toward disaster out of a wish to solve a lover's disappearance.
In class we discussed how this film came out after disclosures about US military abuses at the Abu Gharaib prison in Iraq. It was also in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when former client states struggled to find a new economic track and corruption could flourish.