Unbelievably bad.

Rating: 1/10 (8 April 2006)

When I see movies like Hostel, it makes me sad for the state of the so-called "horror" genre these days. Hostel is far from "the most terrifying movie of the last 10 years", as it has been billed. All it actually is is the two things that get young males going - nudity (for the first 50 minutes of the film) and the pointless violence (for the last 40).
The fact that this film even got made speaks volumes about Lion's Gate Studios. The film does not even get properly started for about 50 minutes, the majority of which plays like a bad soft-core porn flick. After that, we get to the "Hostel" of the title. The only problem is that the characters are so poorly developed and frankly, unlikable, that you don't really care about what is happening to them.
The second half of the film is just a mass of gratuitous human torture scenes with absolutely no point in any of it. The violent street children seem like a pointless exercise in trying to comment on the situation of the world today and it fails.
In fact everything about this movie fails spectacularly. It's not erotic. It's not scary. It doesn't have anything intelligent to say about the world (contrary to what other people have tried to claim). Overall, I would seriously suggest you avoid this video nasty. I would rate it at less than 1 star, but the site won't let me.