Exploitative and Boring

Rating: 1/10 (1 December 2006)

***Hey! This Comment Contains Spoilers!***
I'm not sure why Quentin Tarrantino decided to associate his decent name in any way with this dog of a movie, which is yet another in a recent series of xenophobic slasher films(Wrong Turn, The Hills Have Eyes, House of Wax, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and now, apparently Touristas Go Home, which I haven't seen, but I'm guessing I don't need to) that derives it's so-called "horror" from the cultural and racial biases of its white middle class viewer constituency. In Hostel, the cliché clan of kill-crazy hillbillies has been changed out for a town filled with callous, desperate Eastern Europeans willing to kidnap and sell model-esquire meatheaded Americans to the highest bidder, "prostituting" them, if you will, to a sort of brothel where the very rich can pay to play out their most depraved fantasies of torture, rape and murder. You can't really feel too bad for the Americans though. The first half of the film depicts the main characters as basically a bunch of unlikeable buttheaded jocks who spend all of their time vapidly pursuing drugs and poontang, so it's hard to really empathize or even care when the dudely protagonists are later forced to race through a post-industrial hell of rusty grating and secret dungeons towards salvation from their rich tormentors, who are as one-dimensional and uninteresting as their prey. What I hated most about this film was not that it was dim-witted, poorly scripted/shot, conventional, and just plain not scary (though it WAS all of those things) but that it was sexist, racist, classist, mean-spirited and misanthropic. I know that's a lot of social criticism to heap onto any movie, but it seems warranted given that Hostel itself is sorely lacking any kind of social criticism (unless we are supposed to believe that the film's central trope, in which all rich men are depicted as secretly evil, is supposed to pass for some kind of class critique), and based on the outtakes, the filmmakers seem just as dull and stupid as their protagonists. Speaking as a HUGE fan of horror films, both crappy and otherwise, I don't make such accusations lightly. I have an incredibly high tolerance for tastelessness, gore and misanthropy, but Hostel, more than any film I've seen in the past 5 years, left me with an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. And this is coming from someone who liked American Psycho. There certainly ARE interesting social issues brought up by the plot of such a film, but only accidentally. When it comes down to it, Hostel only knows how to be exploitative.