When People Make Incredibly Bad Choices

Rating: 7/10 (9 June 2006)

"Hostel" is Eli Roth's follow-up after the uber-creepy "Cabin Fever." It even follows the same theme: when people make incredibly bad choices.
In this case, we follow the exploits of Paxton (Jay Hernandez),Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson)and Josh (Derek Richardson), 3 college grads that are determined to have sex with every woman in Europe. It is during one of their barhopping tours that they meet Alex (Lubomir Bukovy),who recommends a hostel in Slovakia where all of their sexual fantasies will be fulfilled.
As the saying goes, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." It seems that the guys soon become nothing more than an experiment in sadism: people are kidnapped and brought to this hostel in order to fulfill the twisted desires of their incredibly rich clients, who can kill another human being in which ever way that they want. And it can get incredibly nasty and bloody.
The film starts off slowly. It doesn't get bloody until about the second half of the film. And many of the scenes of torture are suggestive in nature (One unfortunate soul is about to get their toes clipped, but the viewer never sees this). Incredibly unsettling and will make you hide behind your hands an awful lot (I freely admit that I had to do this several times). What makes it unsettling is that there may be a real possibility that situations like this exist.
This will creep you out.