American psycho (the book) meets your local butcher!

Rating: 10/10 (23 June 2007)

Well... let's say I didn't hear a word about Hostel, when I popped the DVD in... I thought this was one of those teenage standard movies. Teenagers go somewhere, they meet some strange individual and he butchers them... lots of screaming and short skirts... blood everywhere... and so on... blah blah.
What I got instead was something PRIMAL. Something infiltrated the walls of my flat that I really haven't felt since I was attacked by a dog at the age of three. It crept inside my stomach and it made it crunch for a very very very long time... and it made me feel sick for a long time after the movie was over.
I didn't realize what happened at first... but then I got it: the greatest introspection... let's be clever with words... the greatest vivisection of fear in this movie is done by portraying a human like a piece of meat... and even worse... portraying a human being as a helpless!!! piece of meat.
The whistling of the torturer... the atmosphere... uh. It's very hard to be indifferent. It's very hard to see it as a comedy. It doesn't try to be a comedy, because Hostel is a true, horrifying experience. I guess it is one of those movies where reality clashes with fiction... and makes your deepest fears blossom into this crunch. This movie successfully attempts to brutally destroy every single attempt to view it in a more comedy-like way. Because it doesn't allow you to laugh. There is nothing in this movie that can take your concentration away from the suffering victims and their demonic torturers. The great achievement of this movie is, that it doesn't try to obfuscate the nature of horror, but tries constantly to amplify it. It constantly tries to push the fear inside of you to the point you cannot take it anymore and you look away. But hey... you are already shivering and feeling awful! And that's why a 10 is far less than this movie deserves.
This is a cult movie. It's so great that in a sense is a true SNUFF movie. Because it makes you sick, just like it would make you sick if you saw torture live in your flat, garage... And that's far more than I was willing to experience... when I popped the DVD in.
Lots of other viewers tried to diminish the importance of the movie, because of the sexual content... calling it porn. Well, I understood... since watching scream, that every good horror movie, needs to have sexual elements... :) But I guess that is not the only thing the director and writer tried to achieve.
Sex and Death are related.There is a sense in all of this. Young teenagers go to Slovakia to get laid... because teenagers are obsessed by sex, while on the other hand... the old (adult men) are obsessed by Death... and the state of arousal (having sex and killing people) are just two sides of the same coin. That's why the sex in this movie has logic as it needs to balance the pleasure of sex with the "pleasure" of torture and killing.
That's why I mentioned the Brett Easton Eliss' book "AMERICAN PSYCHO", which balanced the sexual arousal with killing and torture in a similar, yet even more disturbing way. When you read the book with graphic depictions of sex it makes your level of arousal so high, that you just don't care if Bateman kills and dismembers them two seconds after. Well, while BEE American psycho has a "good" effect... this movies has exactly the opposite effect... it makes you sick. But in a way... like Eliss' book this movie succeeds in transforming fiction into real sickness of the viewer. And that's something very very very extreme. And unprecedented... in my personal experience.
However... some viewers wrote about the "social" criticism of the movie, noting that it shows the degrade in post-communist countries. Well... as I am a citizen of a post real-socialist country... I see this movie in a perhaps biased way.
The price tags on people... 50.000 for 1 American, 20.000 for a European and 10.000 for a local... shows that the East Europeans see in Americans a special "enemy".
Why would Eastern mafia enjoy so much torturing Americans that it is willing to pay 5 times the price of a local? the movie alludes to the arrogant behavior of Americans which act so bluntly superior to everybody else. 2500 people dead in the WTC attack are far more important than 500.000 killed Iraquis or 1 million killed Vietnamese. The other reason why the Eastern "wealthy" are so eager to torture Americans is because it's the Americans that destroyed the Communist utopia.
Torture can mean two things in a social context: as the West is torturing the New Europe nations... so the Mafia tortures Westerners as an act of revenge. It is important to notice, that the mafia members are buying Americans. Communism had the ambition to make everybody equal, while in this movie Capitalism (money) empowers the mafia members by offering them chances to buy western tourists.
The moral degradation that capitalism brought to eastern nations (in a metaphorical way) is in this movie portrayed as a "pay back time" with the same methods that the West used to destroy the East - by offering money, by buying people... with the American dream...
I think this movie has some pretty sound pillars - aesthetically and fundamentally. It is not a simple horror movie, because it tries hard to have a background... and all said and done... this is probably one of the best horror movies I have seen in 20 years.
Enjoy it and never-mind the low ratings. I'd give it a 12+!