Overview

Rating: 8/10 (20 December 2005)

I was able to attend a special sneak preview screening of Hostel last night in the Los Angeles Area. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. I will be the first to admit that I was not enthralled with Cabin Fever, Eli Roth's first horror film, but I was amazed at how well this movie was done. There is something so unsettling about a place that seems to pander to the visceral basis of human nature. The movie was masterfully done, slowly sliding from a place of comfort and happiness to a place of sheer terror. The scenes of torture that you have heard about are just as horrifying as you would expect, definitely worthy of the R-rating the movie received. The transformation of the main character throughout the movie was captured quite well, and the character development overall was very well done. Even though the movie only runs 95 minutes, Eli Roth was able to effectively make us care about the characters and what happens to them. There is plenty going on in this movie, and the short runtime does not detract. There are plenty of moments in the film where you just want to stand up and cheer for the good guys, and go beat the crap out of the bad ones.
And I realize that I am rambling, and my sentences are very disconnected... must be the early morning hours. The point is this is a very good horror movie, and the perfect scary movie to cure the Oscar season slump of artsy films. Come January 6th, I will be seeing this movie again, and if you are a horror fan you should be seeing it as well.