been there, done that....

Rating: 5/10 (8 March 2006)

gotta get as mediocre as I can with a 5 out of 10.
why? because this Hostel nearly mimics everything a Cannibal Ferox or Cannibal Holocaust has already done, and doing so without improving a bit over the classics! I desperately waited for some ingenuity, for some ironic, for ANYTHING that would lift Hostel above the 2 aforementioned classics and bring the exploiter to modern cinema. Alas, nothing. I gotta admit, I truly love Cabin Fever (Eli Roth's first) for everything it has done with the genre that's completely missing in Hostel. With Hostel instead, you get no outstanding soundtrack, no good characters, the casting is terrible, the camera never seems to get above average TV stuff, a stupid script, in conclusion everything you are used to have in a seventies exploiter classic. But instead of going the full homage way with inserting some ironic and self-disrespecting stuff, Eli just did the same stupid stuff they did in the seventies.
Nah, this thing has had some excellent marketing stuff involved and truly outstanding poster art, but behind all this, there's not much at all to explore. Subtract the jungle, insert Slovakian cellar bunkers.